The Beginning
The end of the first week as an IFA trainee had us all with mixed feelings, I mean, who doesn't like the weekend. It has been a week of intensive learning, challenges, idea sharing, mentoring, trivia, connecting, hackathon all the wonderful things in life packed in one week. I can't wait for the next week to begin but my joints are aching for a good Saturday morning sleep.
TLDR;
We started a hackathon. My team and I are working on a solution that will tackle "Inefficient health services in Nigeria using cloud technology". Our solution can be scaled to cover all the countries in Africa. We conducted Primary Market Research (PMR) interviews and we created a user persona. We have also defined a problem statement that defines the problem we are trying to solve based on the feed back we got from the PMR.
Day one was one of the most exciting days of the new year for me. We started with a meeting on Zoom where we met with the IFA team, we got a lot more insight on what IFA is about from Quadri and Margareth. IFA is a team of young, talented, experienced educators and consultants that inspires and trains aspiring African entrepreneurs and gives them the opportunity to work at a startup where they also get to expand their knowledge. They also consult and help startups grow. Everyday, we are reminded about the IFA core values: Being Innovative, collaboration, grit, growth mindset, inclusivity and diversity. I like to call it C-BIGG (see big).
Training Commences
The IFA innovation readiness training started in the afternoon where we were asked to write down problem statements for a Hackathon and possible solutions and submit. I got to meet with the members of my group: Feyi, Ugonna, Emmanuel and Israel on the second day where we wrote down problem statements and had to vote on the problem statement that best defines the problem we are trying to solve. After voting we selected the following problem statement:
A lot of lives are lost because medical practitioners have access to very little or no information about the patient they are treating before hand and there can be a shortage of medical supplies to assist the patient - how can we provide health care workers with the right solutions that will keep them informed and give them accurate and immediate patient information with real time access to medical equipment?
After selecting the problem statement we had to discuss and figure out who the customers for our product will be. We generally agreed that the customers are healthcare users and healthcare providers. The next thing to do was to brainstorm and write down questions to ask customers as part of our Primary Market Research (PMR). We wrote down a list of questions and everyone was tasked to bring a list of people they would like us to interview. Together, we brought a list of 10 people and we started conducting the PMR. And that was where the first step in our design thinking process started. "Empathize".
Design Thinking
Now, Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown. I can't say all this from my head, I got the definition from interaction-design.org. I like to call the phases involved in design thinking EDIPT. Makes it easier to remember.
The real work begins
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, we had to conduct our PMR on Zoom where one team member asks the questions and the other takes notes. The first one we conducted, Feyi asked questions and I took notes. It was an interesting session and after conducting a few more interviews, we started looking at our problem statement differently and when we tried to Define the problem statement again, we saw that we had to change our own problem statement.
Due to the nature of our project and considering it will be beneficial to both healthcare user and healthcare providers, and also putting into consideration that healthcare users can also be healthcare providers and vice-versa, we wrote down the following questions:
Healthcare users:
Do you have any recurring ailments that affect medical treatments generally?
- Please share info on this
When was the last time you visited the hospital? - Please walk me through this experience.
Can you remember your best ever experience in the hospital? - What were the highlights?
Can you remember your worst experience in the hospital? - What were the highlights?
Have you or your loved one ever been denied healthcare? - Can you tell me about this experience?
Healthcare providers:
Have you ever made a mistake diagnosing a patient due to unavailability of medical records?
What are the Implications of Inconsistent medical data supply on the healthcare system and national economy?
What’s your opinion on data analytics and management in the healthcare sector? Does the information help to make decisions? And is it rich enough that we can really figure out why something is happening?
Are adequate health IT infrastructures available to ensure proper data collection, and what can be done better about it?
From our PMR interviews, we learnt that doctors are interested in having a digital database for their patients that contains all the relevant patient medical record. They also want an affordable system that connects all the departments in the hospital for seamless transfer of information between departments and also a system that can as well ensure the privacy of patients.
The first "AHA!" moment
During a series of breakout sessions with IFA we created the "Customer Persona".
Introducing Chukwuma Adekunle Ciroma
After creating the persona, we had to redefine our problem statement. During that breakout session, we reviewed our problem statement and worked on our "How Might We" statement. We finally agreed on using:
How might we provide a digital data management platform for the healthcare system that significantly improves the efficiency of doctors in the hospital through the availability of accurate medical records?
as the problem statement to work with.
Our discussions so far with customers, opened our eyes to a lot of things we never considered like data privacy, stigmatization and patients tendency to withhold information from doctors and our solution will find a way to solve those.
Well, after all this, I would say that week one was an interesting week and I am looking forward to week 2.
Thank You for reading. I'll keep you posted when anything else comes up. I have to sleep now.