Challenge

I am a medical instruments importer and distributor in Brazil and as the market gets

more and more saturated with competitors I felt the need to innovate and bring something new  to be implemented using our current customer base.

We decided to implement radio frequency identification (RFID) in a hospital environment

aiming the fast growing field of the IoT.

The idea was to assess what were the biggest problems that this technology could help

solving.  There are multiple ways that RFID can help track people or objects. Our challenge was  to identify problems and rank them in order of importance.

Selection

After the first talks with hospital management it was decided to use Journey Mapping

as design tool in order to put myself in the shoes of the hospital operations manager (in this  case head nurse). After getting insights about the hospital operation, I used Visualization tools  in order to expose the information I gathered and try to make sense of it.

Application

I have made an immersion into the environment by following the hospital´s head nurse

for one afternoon. I made notes on her day-to-day activities and made some enquiries on what  she thought was important for her own job and what she thought was important for the  organization.

After I gathered this information, I used the “art gallery” technique in order to download

the information to the managers of the following departments: ICU, Operating theatre,  Emergency room, Day hospital, Sterilization Central.

We used images of equipment and instruments as well as a basic floor plan of the

hospital. I gave Post-its to all participants so they could stick their insights wherever they  wanted.

Insights & Approach

Although we came to very interesting insights about the hospital organization, we

started drifting away from the main objective (which was to rank what problems RFID could  solve). We had a difficult time to come to terms on which were the most important issues to be  ranked as most of the department managers had very diverse and specific needs.

My opinion is that instead of using these DT tools with higher management I should

perform it with each individual team first, so I could identify more basic needs for object  tracking and after that bring it to the management level.

Next time I plan to use the same tools but I plan to apply them to each individual

department first and afterwards try to get all departments in one meeting. The idea is that the  individuals may have a more clear idea of their own needs before empathizing with other  departments. Once each sector knows what they need individually, they can all come together  and decide what is most important for the organization as a whole.

