Sheba
A Design Sprint Case Study

Client

Sheba Medical Center ARC innovation lab

Industry

Healthcare

Services

Design Sprint, Rapid Prototyping, UX/UI

By Ram Almog,

CEO

Integrating A.I. into the clinical treatment

Introduction

Israel’s Sheba Medical Center ranks 9th in the world in Newsweek’s prestigious list.
It’s a huge facility and it’s innovation lab runs more than 40 Machine learning research projects.
When the Covid-19 outbreak started, we knew we wanted to take part in the effort, make ourselves useful.
Sheba was in the midst of a war, and as part of their strategy, they installed status dashboards in the Corona departments, showing them the current patients stats and available resources.
A lot of data was coming in and the Machine Learning team was working on prediction models that will help the doctors assess possible deterioration of patients based on different measurements, background illness and the progress of the disease. Sheba’s innovation center wanted to use the situation and the change of atmosphere to get a better understanding of how these types of models should be integrated. She wanted to come out with a great process that will ensure cooperation and real impact for these type of projects.

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The Challenge

We had 2 big barriers:

This had to be a remote sprint for obvious reasons.
There was no way we could get the entire team’s attention including doctors for our regular full 2 days workshop. But we wanted to make an impact and we did not want this to become a long process. We wanted a sprint – so results are relevant.

What we offered is to help them find out how to integrate these predictive models into the doctor’s day to day routine. This wasn’t a simple UX task as doctors are very busy, and overloaded and are very suspicious of technologies that try to be predictive. Also, machine learning algorithms need training and we needed doctors to cooperate and give us input.

To overcome our challenges, it was clear to me and my team that we need to do a few shifts in the process.
First, we made one on one interviews with as many people as we could get.
Especially senior doctors that were willing to give us their mind. To prepare everybody for the interview and sprint, we sent the interviewees a questionnaire, asking them about the challenges and their long term goal.

Based on the interviews, we prepared the user journey map:

and some of the main challenges we got from the users, reframed in an “How Might We” question format.

Next, we split the workshop into 3 zoom sessions, 3 hours each: Define the challenge, Create Multiple solutions, Curate and select a solution. The rest of the sprint was carried out internally with scheduled feedback from Sheba’s team.

The 1st Session

Let’s dive deep into the process:
The first session was focused on defining the challenge. It’s all about alignment! Making sure we are all on the same page and fully understand what we need to solve. This was a remote sprint so we used Mural to help us communicate and interact. On Mural, we use a preset template with dedicated spaces to all exercises. We also prepared a personal space for each participant so we can apply the sprint’s “Together Alone” principle.

The format we use for this is the “How might we” questions, for example: “How might we generate trust” or “How might we get feedback on our predictions”.
Reframing challenges into this format helps us refine them and standardize them into solvable challenges.

Sheba A Design Sprint Case Study