A Journey to Pathology 3.0: Customer Development

The pathology community should be actively contemplating the forthcoming socio-economic and political landscape. While changes are inevitable, their precise form is still unclear. The ability to acquire knowledge and a thoughtful approach to risk and reward will distinguish wise leaders from bureaucrats or gamblers. The ability to reperceive how the world works by questioning one's assumptions will be one of the defining features of strategic competence, providing a reassuring guide in uncertain times.

We already mentioned the concept of a strategy kernel in this blog. It requires diagnostics to identify the problems and challenges and construct a streamlined view of reality, a guiding policy to focus on solutions, and a set of coherent and coordinated actions that carry out the guiding policy and deliver the solution that overcomes the challenge.

Strategic diagnostics is more about a disciplined way of thinking than a single formal methodology, a tool is as good as the hand that uses it. A helpful method to rev up the mental engine is scenario analysis, pioneered in the early 1970s by Pierre Wack from the Royal Shell. A scenario serves as a tool to organise one's perceptions of potential future environments where decisions may unfold. It helps to structure one's understanding of alternative future and emotionally prepare teams for dealing with potential challenges, instilling a sense of preparedness and proactivity. The scenarios are not random ramblings but narratives crafted in such a way that significant elements of the landscape could stand out boldly.

As mentioned in this blog often, pathology should relentlessly focus on quality, productivity, innovation, and growth. Growth and productivity in pathology require structural changes, technology, and reimagined and more engaging relationships with service users. ?

As pathology services grow in size and scope and our clinical workforce becomes more fluid, the latter is becoming more difficult and may require flipping the thinking script if we are to construct our service around the needs of our service users. Product development businesses have practised customer development for ages; it is a structured strategic process that involves systematically identifying and understanding potential customers' needs, validating ideas and assumptions through customer feedback, and developing products or services that meet those needs. Essentially, we need to align our service with reality, not our assumptions, to ensure that users are understood, feel understood and get value from our service.?

The excellent post by Keith Kaplan on a very illustrative topic that has resonated in the pathosfere for generations highlights this concept well. Since the time of typewriters, pathologists have internally agonised about the 'style' of their reports while, as Keith said, "clinicians want a legible report, with the appropriate elements in a timely, accurate manner."?Nothing more, nothing less.

Pathology reports may be a rewarding topic for engagement with clinical users. ?Over the last century, pathology reports have evolved. With the introduction of software and relevant datasets, the standardisation of content and paperless distribution has generally improved quality and user access. Unfortunately, many reports still structurally inhabit the world of typewriters and carbon copy papers. Their structure is linear and follows the process that generates them in the lab. I will use an example from histopathology because it is close to me: clinical information followed by macro/gross description, microscopy and diagnosis. Is this the way our users want to read them? Indeed, our report-generating software can decouple the way pathologists assemble reports and the way the findings are presented to users so that they can extract relevant patient management intelligence in a clinically effective and safe manner.

Another excellent example, compiled by the Dartmouth Medical School and Wired Magazine team almost fifteen years ago, explores a makeover of blood test reports from the patient's perspective. It is an interesting read, and it's free. Make sure to give it a good read.

#Pathology #HealthcareTransformation #Leadership #IntegratedCare #Innovation #laboratorymedicine #pathologynetworks #pathology30 #diagnostics #healthcare #digitalpathology #histopathology #biochemistry #microbiology #immunology #haematology #transformation #NHS