Innovation Scouting

Here’s my needs based approach to tech vendor landscape research and deployment

Check out this podcast episode where I discuss our innovation process at NYU Langone Health!

TLDR: here’s my process

Context

Part of my job is to stay in-the-know about advanced tech impacting healthcare, like robots, computer vision, and AI. As our leaders are planning for future IT and infrastructural needs, we’re often asked to find top vendors in the space and pilot some.

Reinterpreting the ask

While important to build relationships with top tech companies, we must first ask ourselves some questions:

Why do we need this tech? What core needs of our patients, providers, or staff is this tech solving for?

Speaking with folks onsite

I’ve gone onsite to visit the underbelly of our busy hospital, speaking to folks from the kitchen, linens, building services, pharmacy, and more to document their problems and needs, and be their voice to our IT department.

Surfacing useful tech

I’ve done tech scans across hospitality, airlines, Big Tech, transportation, and logistics to get inspired by parallel industries. I lead calls with companies to better understand their products, and compare them against other players and measure ROI.

Imagining novel tech @ NYU Langone

My favorite way to show how we can integrate acquired or home-grown novel tech into our health system is through storyboarding: either simple sketches or UI mockups and AI images.

Evaluating pilots

For tech that leadership takes forward to onsite pilots, I aim to highlight true improvements to our processes amidst the shiny product claims.

Here are some examples:

I’ve surveyed over 100 NY Metro patients to understand comfort with use cases and A/B test product language.

I’ve interviewed and shadowed doctors to understand how novel tech impacts their practice.

I’ve developed custom analysis scripts to reveal utilization rates and uptake of novel tech.

Defining implementation strategy

Combining on-the-ground research, survey data, usage analytics, and knowledge of institutional priorities gained from stakeholder conversations, I summarize learnings into core experience principles or implementation guidelines, giving them zippy titles to make them mean something upon first glance.

I socialize this deliverable with leadership stakeholders, and work with operational teams for hand-off and implementation.