Written with the assistance of GPT-4
Welcome to our Innovation and Design Course for Surgeons and Trainees. In Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup, Ries introduces the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) - a barebones version of a product or service with just enough features to excite early adopters, test assumptions, and obtain feedback. Decidedly imperfect, an MVP serves as the basis to experimentally determine whether an idea has merit and is worthy of further investment. While Ries's principles are now commonplace in the tech industry, they have yet to be formalized within academic surgery.
The need for innovation in surgery is clear. We have written about it here if you are interested in reading more. However, most innovation education is restricted to limited fellowships that can only engage a few trainees at a time. Often, to be part of innovation, trainees have to leave clinical practice and focus on it. Can innovation education be embedded into residency training itself? This project is our attempt to answer that question.
Over the course of six interactive sessions, we aim to explore whether busy residents can learn design thinking and effectively incorporate this valuable practice into their academic work and future careers. As end-users of today's broken healthcare system, residents are uniquely positioned to identify the challenges and pain points in the surgery and drive meaningful change through innovative solutions.
Our program is structured around the following sessions:
Complaining Rounds: In this session, we'll harness the frustrations that you experience in your daily residency work, transforming them into a constructive platform for identifying areas of improvement.
Walkabout: Observing pain points is crucial for problem-solving. We'll teach you how to recognize and assess these issues, enabling you to develop targeted solutions.
Stakeholder Interviews: Understanding and validating the pain points is a critical step in the design process. We'll guide you through the process of identifying and engaging with key stakeholders to ensure your solutions address real needs.
Divergent Ideation: Creativity is the lifeblood of innovation. In this session, we will introduce techniques to stimulate divergent thinking, empowering you to generate a wide range of potential solutions.
Prototyping: Learn how to create low-fidelity models that help you test your assumptions and validate the feasibility of your ideas. This hands-on session will equip you with the skills necessary to bring your solutions to life.
Lean Experiments: The final session focuses on designing quick experiments and utilizing iterative improvements to refine and optimize your solutions.
While the sessions are numbered, they can be used in any order. They can each be completed in an hour or a week. They can likely be incorporated into standard protected academic time or be done over a casual lunch. Finally, we included a seventh session titled Pitfalls and Pivots to document reasons why this curriculum will not work. By identifying these barriers, we can best navigate how to overcome them.
Often, the first rule of innovation is thought to be the need to obtain intellectual protection for novel ideas. We are breaking thar rule immediately. We want this curriculum to be free and available in the public domian. By building the curriculum on GitHub, users can copy it, download it, change it, modify it, and create their own versions. We want people to create their own branches of the innovation tree. We might even pull some of the changes back into the main trunk. That is how innovation should be - creative, collaborative, and open source. So please do whatever you want with this.
Through this comprehensive program, we are confident that participants will gain valuable design thinking skills, enabling them to tackle complex challenges and contribute to advancements in healthcare. The capacity to innovate does not belong to a certain group of individuals or institutions. It belongs to everyone who faces frustrations and dreams of a better tomorrow. Join us on this exciting journey, and together, let's revolutionize the future of academic surgery.
Designed by Tejas S. Sathe, MD and others
4.4.23 - Started Build