Customer Discovery with the VA
Customer discovery is the process a startup should begin with to confirm that there is a market for the product they want to develop. Namely, it’s the process in which we answer questions like: Does the product we want to develop solve an actual existing problem? Are there customers that will pay for and use this product? Do we really understand the problem or are we making too many assumptions?
Without answers to these questions, startups risk wasting time, money, and other resources to develop a product that no one will want to buy. This could be either because the problem it’s trying to solve doesn’t exist or because the assumed features don’t actually help the end-users. This is why before we wrote a single line of code, we set out to gain a better understanding of the healthcare space. We wanted to understand the main headaches that hospital personnel suffer on a daily basis and would love to have solved yesterday.
Networking really is everything. After five levels of introductions we were introduced to Frank Zitko, the innovation specialist at the VHA facility at Cleveland, OH. Frank informed us about the Greenhouse Initiative; a program created by the Veterans Health Administration Innovator’s Network (VHA iNET). From their website: “the Greenhouse [initiative] is an opportunity for the health care innovation community to collaborate with iNET sites throughout the country at the earliest stages of innovation”. The main benefit of this collaboration is that it grants us direct access to perform human-centered interviews and design research.
We are grateful to the three innovation specialists who agreed to work with us:
Caitlin Rawlins (Asheville, NC)
Frank Zitko (Cleveland, OH)
Julie Whitney (Gainesvlle, FL)
Their vote of confidence opened the doors for us to enter into a six-month CRADA (Collaborative Research and Development Agreement) with the VHA iNET. This allowed us to visit their facilities for a week each! During these visits we interviewed various hospital personnel (e.g., sterile processing chiefs and technicians, surgeons, OR nurses, scrub techs, and logistics managers), and passively observed them perform their daily duties.
Collin, Sergio, and Kevin
Getting ready to enter the “decontamination room” at the Cleveland, OH VHA facility. All decontamination rooms require personnel to wear extensive PPE to protect them from bio-hazards.
Our participation in the Greenhouse Initiative’s Phase 1 culminated in identifying various areas in the pipeline for processing surgical instruments that are prone to human error, which yield inefficiencies that ultimately affect operating room usage and, potentially, patient outcome. In general, these inefficiencies are due to hospital staff dedicating a non-trivial amount of time to utility and logistical tasks instead of focusing on the clinical tasks that require their expertise. Knowing what these inefficiencies are and the headaches the cause gives us the confidence that we need to make sure that the products and solutions we develop will have an audience that is eager to implement them.
Looking to the future, we’re eager to continue our participation in Phase 2. We will continue to leverage the experience and expertise of the SPS professionals at the VA facilities we visited to gain more insight into their problems and how we can guide our design and development to better serve them.
For more information, you can read the VHA Innovators Network 2021 annual report here.