GUBING WANG
HELLO I'M GUBING
I LOVE SOLVING PROBLEMS
E. Dial
Problem Breifing
In the EIT Health Innovation Day, we designed E. Dial and came the second out of 20 teams. Let me tell you the story. EIT stands for European Institute of Innovation and Technology, an independent body of the EU set up in 2008 and its mission is to spur innovation and entrepreneaurship across Europe to overcome some of its greatest challenges. The Innovation Day is organised by EIT Health Department and aims to boost the entrepreneurial spirit among students to tackle healthcare and ageing-related problems, and take place in Sweden, Denmark and the UK in 2016.
From the inspiring talk of Sylvie Bove, the CEO of EIT Health, I got to know the four main trends in healthcare in Europe and would like to share them here:
1) Shift from curative to preventive business model
2) Engage the public to managing their health (i.e. shift from hospital-based to patient-based model)
3) Adoption of current technologies (e.g. big data, biosensors, Wi-Fi)
4) Reduce the barriers for implementation (as HCPs tend to draw on their past experiences for making judgement)
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We then had a design thinking workshop with Helen van Baal, Molly Wilson and Alejandro Lecuna, who are expertise in teaching and applying design thinking. Our assigned design brief is to help people decide whether they really need to go to the emergency department (A&E) and what to do instead. My two lovely teammates are Dijana (Biochemist) and Intan (Pharmacist) from Imperial.
Interviews and Insights
We first shared our own experiences with A&E. We found out that A&E deals with genuine life-threatening emergencies, and less severe injuries can be treated in urgent care centres (UCC). People dial 111 for A&E support while 112 for UCC.
We went on the exhibition road and had a few chats with people. We tried to cover a wide demographic range. The suprising insight we found is that while the local people know the difference between A&E and UCC and they will try everything they could before going to A&E, foreign travellers do not. Travellers express that they would just call 111 as they think this is the safest thing to do when they are in a completely unfamiliar environment. So it is not uncommon to see a women in miscarriage have to queue after a person sprained his ankle in A&E. We therefore defined the POV to be designing a way to inform the foreign travellers about A&E and UCC in the UK.
Final Design
We used brainwriting as the ideation method, then built upon each others' ideas, and finally came up with E. Dial. E. Dial is an app that helps travellers in the UK to decide whether their health situation is emergent or not, and help them to dial the correct number. I created the UI of E. Dial using paper prototype and tested it on a couple of potential users, we then improved E. Dial based on their feedbacks. (i.e. include sync feature, incorporate NHS-based algorithms).
Storyboard in words
Let's imagine Ann just arrived UK for travelling. When she was landed at the airport, she saw a poster advertising E. Dial. She thought: "it won't harm to download a free app plus I have asthma, I might need emergency support". Once downloaded, she set her native language and then either sync her personal information and data from her health tracking apps or fill in a simple form about her health conditions. That's all she needed to do and she closed the app. One day, she felt short of breath and dizzy, she remembered she download E. Dial, and when she opened it, a few customised questions based on her own health conditions pop up, these questions only takes 30 seconds. From Ann's answers and the inbuilt NHS algorithm E. Dial made its decision. It turned out that Ann's situation is not urgent enough for A&E, and E. Dial showed the nearby pharmacists near her based on Ann's current location and dialled 112 when Ann felt she want to go to UCC. In the end, Ann avoided the hassle to go to A&E, which let A&E to focus on genuine emergency cases and possibly save more people lives.
Final Pitch
I learned how to deliver an effective pitch and some enuniciation techniques from our amazing pitch coach Beth Susanne. We then structured our pitch to cover the following six areas:
What is the problem/opportunity
Why is our technology unique
How big is our market
How do we make money
Introduce our team
Ask for collaboration and funding
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In the end, E. Dial wins the positive feedbacks from the panel and the majority of participants. Beth said, "I am not sure if it is a good idea for all of you to pitch together at the begining, but the connection turned out to be smooth and the message is clear, well done!"
Key Learning
The main takeaway for me from EIT Health Innvoation Day is to experience how a bright idea can be developed into a real life product and applied to tackle health challenges faced today. Most importantly, this idea came from understanding and empathy with our stakeholders. Even though this challenge is only 9 hours long, I have practiced the innovation tools used in Stanford d. School, and will use these tools more for my future projects.