This post is part of the Biodesign’s Jugaad series following a group of Stanford Biodesign fellows from India. (Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an inexpensive, innovative solution.) The fellows will spend months immersed in the interdisciplinary environment of Stanford Bio-X, learning the Biodesign process of researching clinical needs and prototyping a medical device. The Biodesign program is now in its 14th year, and past fellows have successfully launched 36 companies focused on developing devices for unmet medical needs.
When I showed up to meet with the Biodesign fellows, Debayan Saha greeted me by saying, “We are arguing - please join us.”
The source of the argument turned out to be a thorny one. The team had previously attended cardiovascular disease clinics and from those visits identified more than 300 possible needs that, if addressed, might improve patient care.
Now, their job was to narrow down those 300+ needs to the one they would eventually develop a prototype device to address.
Part of the process Stanford Biodesign fellows learn is a rigorous method for identifying medical needs that also make business sense to address. The first step: eliminate the duds.
In this round, the each team member had individually rated the needs according to their individual levels of interest on a scale of 1 to 4. That interest could reflect the fact that they think the technology is interesting, or the fact that the need is one they would be excited about addressing.
Now they were trying to rate the needs on the same 1 to 4 scale according to the number of people who would benefit if it were addressed. The combination of these two ratings—one subjective and the other objective—would produce a shorter list of needs that were both of interest to the fellows and would benefit enough people that any future company could be successful
That objective rating was the source of the polite disagreement I had walked into. As one example, if a particular need applied to people who had a stroke, should they assume that all people who have had a stroke would benefit from a solution (giving the need a higher rating of 4), or would only a small subset benefit (giving the need a lower rating of 1 or 2)?
By and large Harsh Sheth, MD, leaned toward 4s while Shashi Ranjan, PhD, leaned toward 2s. Saha mostly just leaned back. Much discussion ensued.
In the end the team managed to assign a single score indicating the number of people represented by each need. When combined with their subjective scores, the group was able to eliminate the lowest scoring needs and reduce the list to a mere 133.
One interesting thing I learned is that this careful rubric is harder to apply in India, where good numbers about how many people have particular conditions are harder to come by. Ranjan told me that even in India they would likely use U.S. numbers for some conditions and just scale up to the Indian population. I mentally added this lack of good data to the list of reasons Stanford-India Biodesign Program executive director (U.S.) Rajiv Doshi, MD, told me that biodesign is more challenging in India.
Previously: Writing a “very specific sentence” is critical for good biodesign and Good medical technology starts with patients’ needs
Photo by Yasmeen
