Simona Blasi, Peer-graded assignment, Design Thinking for Innovation    Challenge:    The health care experience is typically straight forward; we expect it to have an outcome that  provides us with a course of action (i.e., an intelligent, honest provider who tells us what’s wrong  and sets us on a course of action). But, what about all the other pieces of the journey along the  way?    We define our patient journey as of discovering, engaging, caring, getting better, managing  costs and living life. Every patient has a story; a place they’re trying to go. Along this journey, it’s  important for us to remember that and offer ourselves to help them get there.     With that, each piece of the journey has potential to add small, but significant, experiences that  build personal, meaningful elements.    We feel virtual reality could be one of those experiences during the caring part of the journey.  But, I didn’t want to offer it and not know what patients thought (e.g., content, feelings, physical  reaction). We don’t really know how patients will react to it so we need to learn more.     Selection:    A learning launch is just what’s needed to help guide this decision and learn more about how  patients feel about a virtual reality experience added to care. As I learned in this course, the  times of the standard business plan are gone. It’s time to experiment and not just base our  actions on guessing and projection.    As defined, a learning launch i​s a carefully designed experiment or prototype designed to test  the key underlying value-generating assumptions of a potential new-growth initiative. A  “business-world application of the scientific method.”    As Sebastian Garcia said in the lecture, “​at learning launch you are launching out there into the unknown.”  And, that’s exactly what we need to do to learn more about patients’ feelings on virtual reality.    “New-growth” for this launch is adding a meaningful experience to patient care through virtual  reality. It’s not based on ROI, it’s based on adding value patient experience. We need to learn  how value is defined in this case.    For this we will go through the key stages:

1. Immerse yourself in the data that already exists.

2. Generate a new business idea - an educated guess about the opportunity.

3. Articulate the assumptions on which the new business idea’s success is based.

4. Design and conduct a learning launch to test assumptions.

5. Revise or kill the idea based on your findings.

6. Scale the business idea when appropriate.

I have found that in health care, learning launches can be a bit tricky as it can be hard to stay  quick and nimble along that way. That is the biggest challenge as there are additional variables  at play (consent forms, ensuring confidentiality and total privacy, scheduling and help from staff,  cleaning of the equipment - building a protocol).    Application​:    I researched the existing virtual reality research and testing that has been done in other health  care settings. There is a decent amount of information, but focused on inpatient settings.  Overall, the experience is positive in many different applications (pain, experience, distraction).    Based on that, we wanted to focus on the outpatient setting and make it transferrable across our  regions.     Our hypothesis is that virtual reality will help patients’ immerse themselves in content and be a  positive distraction away from treatment in an outpatient setting. Our goal: to talk to 60 patients  and 25 care providers across the three regions.    What don’t we know is the value of virtual reality as an experience. Does it have a long term  effect on patient experience or just a short-lived feeling? How nimble can we be in making  changes after we implement the program? If we create a virtual reality program for outpatient  treatments and it means short-lived freedom for one patient, isn’t it worth the effort?     We created a simple testing protocol and discussion guide to test our hypothesis. First, we ask  patients to tell us a little about themselves and their experience at the clinic. Second, we find out  what they know about virtual reality. Then, we give them a choice between two different pieces  of content and they experience it. Finally, we ask about their emotional and physical feelings  after watching, what they liked, didn’t like and if they’d want virtual reality as an option when  they come in for treatment.    Each interview takes 15-45 minutes depending on the patient. We estimate it will take about  three weeks to interview patients. This is a fast moving test in our world. As of this assignment, I  have interviewed 26 patients and 25 care providers. We have also talked to three caregivers  who were also interested in trying it out.     Insight​:    At this time, we have run into overwhelming positive results. Nearly all patients feel a sense of  transportation and joy with the content. They have been immersed enough that it has served as

a distraction from treatment and many have used the words “relaxing,” “transported,” “calming,”  and “awesome” to describe their experience. All but one person would want to use it during  future treatments. Most rated the experience as a 4 out of 5 with many 5 ratings.    If we were to stop here (and, it would be plenty of interviews to do so) we’d be able to make a  strong case to get a program in place to enhance experience at the care stop in our overall  patient journey.    We’ll continue our interviews so we can have a good sample across our regions, but the  learning launch has been very eye-opening to helping understand more about the  implementation of virtual reality and helps go beyond typical “guessing” approach of business  plan and moves us to learning more about real value and definitely builds a stronger case for  why this could be a valuable addition to care.    Approach​:    Quite honestly, as I’ve stated above, I will continue to apply the learning launch technique to this  specific challenge. It allows me to be nimble and test new hypotheses quickly and cheaply. As  virtual reality technology and content changes, we’ll need to be agile and keep doing small tests  over time to enhance the experience, but also make sure it is still making a difference along the  patient journey.     Before this class, I was going to write a lengthy business plan built from secondary research  and a lot of guessing. Now, I have an agile testing process that allows to learn from real patient  experiences and the ability to learn and grow after implementation.

