Welcome back! Today wrapped up the three day Needs Finding Bootcamp here in San José. We spent this time doing a variety of clinical observations and learned to identify different needs for users – from patients, to clinicians, to techs, and more.
To kick the bootcamp off, we started at CICICA – Centro de Investigación en Cirugía y Cáncer – at el Univerdad de Costa Rica. We met with other students from various universities around San José and learned about what needs finding is. Essentially, it’s the process of uncovering what unmet needs exist in the medical space and learning how to identify them from the activity, environment, interactions, objects, and users in the room. This day also included a tour of the CICICA facilities from Dr. Zuñiga. We got to see patient rooms, labs and the simulation rooms. I even got to try some of the exercises that they use to help train clinicians on how to do endoscopic procedures!
Tuesday started off our clinical rotations. My team spent the morning with Dr. Vargas at Hospital Mexico in the neurosurgery ORs. I hadn’t even been an OR (as a patient nor an observer), so it was neat to see it with the curtain pulled back (literally!). We got to sit in on both an endoscopic ocular tumor removal and a cranial tumor removal. It was interesting to learn about how the OR was set up for each procedure and to understand what all the machines in the room were.
That afternoon, we moved to la Hospital de Niños and worked with Dr. Ramos in ENT to sit in on patient consults. Sine there wasn’t too many, I got to scrub in again and was given a tour of their OR. Given that I had spent the morning in the adult OR, it was cool to see where the similarities and differences are. Even though they deal with two different populations, they still share similar problems like storage space and maintaining sterility.
Then, this morning, I had my final observation back at Hospital Mexico with Dr. Ernest in Gastroenterology. We got to observe patient monitoring appointments, during which he used an ultrasound to check the progression of their pathologies. I got to learn more about GI and how diseases can present and the challenges that GI presents – specifically around being able to visualize the full tract.
We then met back at CICICA to wrap up and learn how to turn the observations into needs statements that can be used by engineers as a jumping off point for solution creation. The premise is taking the affected population, the problem, and the desired solution and creating a single statement – there needs to be a way to [address the problem] in [population] in order to [outcome]. We then talked about how you can change the statement to reflect a variety of scopes, based on how you want to tackle the problem. One key note from this was how important it is to not specify a solution. You don’t want to limit yourself at this point in the design process, so avoid speculating on what you could do.
Overall, this was an unforgettable experience. I feel especially lucky that I got to observe in the OR several times. It was something I had never done before and affirmed how important it is to see those spaces as an engineer. It’s one thing to read about how these procedures are done, but it’s another thing entirely to be there in person. It showed me how important it is to get the in person experience and talk to the people who interact with the devices and understand how they use it, work around the problems, and what those problems actually are.
Up next, I’ll be able to implement this in the Medical Innovation Bootcamp over the next three days, and the rest of my time in Costa Rica!