This week has been our three-day needs finding course with students from Rice and two universities here in Costa Rica – the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) and the Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC). We started with a classroom session on Monday where we discussed the purpose of ethnography and how it can apply to needs finding. A great example we saw in a TED talk was from a group of researchers who wanted to improve the experience of parking in New York City, and spent a lot of time just observing street parking behavior before proposing some visual changes to street signs. We also talked about different types of bias and how to avoid these biases in our interview questions.
Each group then observed three locations over the next two days. My group mainly observed the private sector. We started in the emergency department of Hospital Clínica Bíblica. It was a pretty quiet evening, so we didn’t see any major incidents, but watched the nurses as they prepared medications and documented their notes in the electronic medical record system. At Hospital CIMA the next day, we received a tour from their chief biomedical engineer. He showed us several devices that his team repairs, such as beds and blood pressure monitors. He also spoke to us about some of the larger projects he oversees, such as upgrading all the equipment in the cardiac cath lab. Finally, we visited the Hospital de Trauma, which was my favorite location. We had a tour of several departments of the hospital, and also had the chance to speak with some patients and observe the physical therapy gym. We also talked about the insurance system here in Costa Rica. There are a few different types of insurance that a patient can be covered by in addition to the social security fund, and although I’m not sure that we fully understood the system, it helped me get a sense of the complexity. The United States is far from the only country with a complex insurance landscape!
We’ve also had a great time getting to know our Costa Rican counterpart, Kathy. She’s a materials science student at TEC. We had lunch together in the UCR cafeteria on Monday and she told us about her research to improve the safety of the titanium used in medical implants.
One of our challenges this week has been the traffic! Our travel time to the various hospitals has been a little longer than what Google Maps has predicted, so we’ve needed to adjust to leaving a bit earlier than we think is necessary. It’s been a little tricky, although I’m confident we’ll eventually get the hang of it. Up next – medical device bootcamp and starting our internships on Monday!