🔍 Discover
Lorie and I came into this project with previous experience both with Orthopedics and with Surgery workflows; both of us had been involved in the investment case for Orthopedics at the end of 2019. We kicked off the process by getting a handle on what we knew and what we still didn’t know about Ambulatory Surgery Centers. Lorie set about identifying the right subject matter experts and trying to find representative ASC clients we could talk to, while I dug into as much previous research as I could to find previous research, business cases, etc. that had been done over the years. I helped us facilitate an internal workshop with SMEs from around the business to help us align our assumptions around the problems in the space, our expected outcomes, and the open questions we still had about the space.
Following the workshop, we created a research plan that would help us uncover:
- What are the key differences between hospital and ASC surgery workflows?
- How does surgery coordination happen when coordinating between clinic and owned/adjacent ASC, compared to a nearby hospital?
- How do the different roles - nurses, staff, patient, and surgeon - interact with each other during the course of a surgery case?
- What documentation is captured along the way - who captures it, when, and how?
Our research included a listening tour with a handful of our more engaged ASC clients, to hear more about their operations, and get them excited to partner with us to create a great product. We followed up with team site visits to three of our ASCs, where we shadowed workflows across the entire surgery journey - from coordinating and scheduling to post-operative recovery. Through this, we were able to find a handful of high-level problem themes we could use to orient our discussions around the problem space.
I also started putting together a service blueprint in MURAL that broke down the high-level steps of the journey from deciding a surgery is required to post-operative followup, layering in the people, documentation, systems, and issues that came in along the way. Along the top of the blueprint, I added a written scenario to help us orient the blueprint around a representative story - of a woman named Joan, who needs to get a hip replacement.
📖 Define
Fresh off our site visits, Lorie and I worked with the crew to map our research findings against the service blueprint. I grouped the stickies into themes, and gave each a brief description for our readout. Seeing the problems up close led us to a series of feature/hypothesis statements that we were able to define and prioritize against the blueprint - helping us to draft an early sketch of our roadmap for the initial offering.
I also worked with our Engineering and UX Leads for the ASC Offering to map out an Object Map to suss out the different objects and their attributes - in particular, which attributes we might be able to transfer directly from the surgery order into the surgery case in the ASC.
📐 Align
Across all of this work, we kept in touch with our peers across functions - Onboarding, Customer Success, Sales, and R&D - with monthly business reviews where we shared snippets of what we were learning and what it all meant. As our listening tour concluded, we also created a private ASC user group on athena’s Success Community that allowed our client co-design partners to get an inside look at what we were doing and provide early feedback. The user group also gave us the ability to do deeper research prior to diving into a problem space; in the first few groups, I used our problem themes (see Discover phase) to lead a focused discussion around one of the themes.
As we started getting a bigger handle on what features/hypotheses we needed to prioritize, we also started bringing in the teams who would be executing on the work to help with, and eventually take over, the research and design of the big bets we had established. In the meantime, I also crafted some key storytelling deliverables to help teams around the org understand what made surgeries distinctly different from the typical 1 patient/1 doctor relationships we often thought about in our world.
