Article summary
I spent the first seven years of my product career in healthcare. The best days on the job were the days I got to “walk the halls” with the clinical teams. Seeing the space gives you a sense of perspective about the work that you just can’t replicate.
Walking the halls
One cold morning in February, I did a live tour of the Trauma center.
“I don’t know if you’ll get to see the whole place or not,” the lead trauma physician said as we rode the elevator up to the helipad, “but we’ll show you what we can.”
The rest of the elevator ride was one of the many moments that day where I paused to be grateful. Shortly after we got back to the ground floor, a patient came in, the clinicians snapped into action, and the tour was abruptly over.
The epic view of the city skyline from the top of the helipad was unforgettable. So, too, was the deep sense of respect for the work that took place there. You can read about it, watch The Pitt, or ask your agent to do the research for you. But there truly is no substitute for being there.
Share the Mental Model
When I started working with a client who specialized in healthcare inventory management, the lessons I learned walking the halls so long ago returned to the front of my mind. I could understand how their product fit into its context quickly.
It’s one thing to know that a Class 1 recall is “bad” or that a Joint Commission audit is “serious.” I doubt anybody would be surprised by either statement. But, when you’ve seen how busy a trauma bay can be, you can understand the problems — and the value of the software that solves them — much more clearly and personally.
Only one problem. I only got that tour a few years back because I had access through my work at the time. Now, I had a whole team of developers to ramp in and get oriented to the space. I could tell the development team my stories in the most vivid detail I could conjure, but I’m no LeVar Burton. So, to build a shared mental model, we did the next best thing.
Go and See
Our client had a small mock facility at their office, complete with crash carts and some medical supplies, which allowed them to give us a “day in the life” style tour of their end users’ workflow. This allowed the rest of the Atomic team to get hands-on with the work of the people who would be using our software.
“Dogfooding” your product is not a revolutionary concept, but it’s easy to skip this step when we can just ask a capable agent to fill in the gaps for us. You can do that, and get pretty far. But in health tech, “getting pretty far” and “good enough” are not, in fact, good enough. You have to be precise.
And the more deeply you understand your product and the context it lives in, the better questions you can ask to get precise when you need to. So, at our kickoff, we did our best impression of walking the halls. This gave the full team a chance to see everything in a prod-like setting.
We were able to use the product ourselves in a very similar setting to the one our end users would be in. No helipads this time around, but we did get hands-on with crash carts, equipment trays, barcode scanners, and more devices we otherwise never would have seen. This allowed each member of the project team to start to form their own understanding.
Where the work pays off
Managing recalls is highly nuanced. Sometimes, the reason for a recall is due to damaged packaging or limited training on how to actually apply the item in a care setting. We needed to map the recalls to a wide range of resolution statuses, and make recommendations on how to handle all of the downstream processes. You could, of course, take a best guess at this and refine it later.
However, with a tight project timeline and the clock ever-ticking, getting this decision wrong would have been costly. With all of our accumulated context in mind, we were able to carefully design a workflow for recall management, understand and address the pitfalls, and get a strong implementation built the first time around.
“I really felt like the Atomic team embraced us and really tried to learn about our business before they tried to come up with solutions for how they were going to help us. Getting to know us and investing the time into us to make the partnership successful,” the client said.
Working in health tech, we’re constantly making analyses and judgment calls like this one. Given the stakes, move fast and break things is terrible advice. And today, you can move faster and break more things than ever before.
Instead, walk the halls. Go and see, and let’s try a little harder to make the right call the first time.