progression from outset to closing. Journey mapping begins with a baselining step intended to capture the current patient experience (irrelevant of your product) from multiple perspectives, as well as interactions within the clinical environment. At each phase, the patient and relevant providers share various touchpoints — action and information flows between people, devices, and systems. The resulting visualization helps to identify inter- and cross-organizational gaps in areas such as data flow, compliance, availability of relevant information, etc. Perhaps most importantly, this exercise also helps to identify relevant stakeholders. A stakeholder is any medical personnel, institution, regulatory agency, investor, medical company, or patient group interested in the effect or outcome of the adoption of a new medical product. Each type of stakeholder can impact the success of a new product. The cycle of care diagram may identify several influencers and potential stakeholders for your product, including: Note that if the patient has an HMO, there could be a restriction on the product, as it may be more expensive than the one, they use, and that the HMO has already been purchased. Most hospitals have a committee that evaluates technologies and decides which ones will be approved. In the committee there may be medical personnel who oppose the patch due to economic or technical reasons. As a part of this exercise, it is important to understand how your new product will integrate in the users ’ practice and workflow — or if your product changes the users altogether. A new product might displace a procedure—and the associated revenue — from one discipline or service to another. For example, a virtual colonoscopy moves revenue from gastroenterology to radiology. The machine learning capabilities of IBM Watson may reduce or eliminate the need for radiologists and pathologists for routine diagnostic work. It is more than likely that the displaced disciplines will oppose the change, so it ’ s important to bear this in mind from the start. Once the optimum level of granularity for your product ’ s cycle of Care has been mapped, you will have a clear understanding of the types of clinical personnel you must talk to validate whether the problem you are planning to tackle is of high importance — in other words, if solved or improved, it would change medical Practice. Keep in mind that you may need to interview different clinical specialties. You may also need to interview several clinicians inside the same specialty who
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