healthcare
Scoping a software chassis for detecting cancer at scale
This diagnostic testing company had built a robust business around anatomical pathology, but the software chassis upon which their entire end-to-end process rested was at end-of-life and made it challenging to onboard new users. However, switching to a new platform risked disrupting a complicated stakeholder relationship with the freelance pathologists who owned the ‘book of business’ that made the service tick.
Key Details
- Complex stakeholder management across a decentralized labour model
- Current state mapping > prototyping > requirements capture helped articulate desired future state
- In just 7 weeks, we produced a vendor-ready procurement package
Our Approach
1
Making anatomical pathology work requires a complex system of internal teams and freelance pathologists to interact seamlessly and with little room for error. We conducted internal research with a broad set of pathologists, technicians, and technical and operational leaders to understand the business, their aspirations for how the service (and its underlying software chassis) should evolve, and to map essential processes.
2
Using this set of maps as a foundation, we worked with key user groups and system stakeholders across functions to work from the ground up to define a vision for the future state, looking at each discrete step of the workflow and discussing what they wanted to see in the new platform. These deep dives allowed us to test hypotheses, tease out tensions, and surface areas of alignment.
3
In the meantime, the service continued to grow on top (and in spite) of the existing software platform. New pathologists brought new business, affording them leverage to raise pain points with the status quo that needed addressing. Rapid prototyping became useful not just for visualizing the future platform, but also as a mediating tool between the immediate needs of users and IT’s ability to change the current platform.
4
As an outcome of this inclusive and responsive design process, we created a procurement package that aligned stakeholders in just 7 weeks, including a clear, readable package of 700+ detailed business requirements for what the future solution would need to be and do.
Key Insights
Any new system would have to manage an active tension: the desire for stronger checks and balances for management versus the desire to maintain extremely high volumes of case completion for the physicians who use the platform every day (and for whom time is money). Visualizing workflows and prototyping helped us to articulate the balance
In high-volume lab contexts, the service model and the underlying data model are hard to separate. We dug deep into how data needed to be structured and how it needed to flow in order to ensure new systems could handle the complex and often urgent cases flowing through the service
Software may have been the chassis, but it plugged into dozens of hardware endpoints and needed to be able to track the disposition, over decades, of thousands of physical samples. Being on site to fully understand the end-to-end flow for samples through multiple workflows enabled the granular detail needed
Outcome
7
the number of weeks it took us to steer the team from an urgent-but-vague need to advance platform replacement to a clear sense of what the future should look like and a set of requirements for how to get there