Hey guys and welcome back to the Medical Entrepreneur podcast.
My name is Adam Sewell, and this is where we teach you how to break free from traditional medicine, carve the career of your dreams, and still do what you love.
As a medical entrepreneur, it can be difficult to focus on the business aspect of things. Our primary focus is often on providing quality care and improving patient outcomes. This requires long hours, on-call shifts, and a significant amount of mental and emotional energy.
Balancing this with the business aspects of running a medical practice, such as managing finances, marketing, and administration, can be a tough challenge. However, it is important for you to prioritize both in order to ensure long-term success.
One thing you can do to help you with that is to apply design thinking to the process of running your business.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a creative and innovative approach to problem-solving. It is often used in the design and development of products and services, but can also be applied to a variety of other fields and challenges, for instance to medical businesses.
The 5 Steps of Design Thinking
Design thinking involves 5 steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
Empathizing
In order to provide the best possible services to your customers, you need to understand who they are and what they need. So the first step is to empathize with your customers. To do so, you need to engage with them and observe their behavior. You may do so by conducting interviews, polls, focus groups, or other methods depending on your specific needs.
Defining
In the second step, you need to define the problem you want to solve. You can do this by analyzing the data you collected in the empathizing phase. Remember that you are identifying your customers’ problems, so you need to look at the problem from their point of view.
Ideating
The third step is to generate ideas. During this process, it is important to think outside the box and come up with lots of solutions, even if they cannot be realized. When you are ready for the next step, narrow down these solutions to a select few that you think are the best.
Prototyping
The fourth step is to turn the solutions you considered best in the ideation phase into prototypes. How you do this will of course depend on the nature of your problem. For example, if you’re redesigning your website, create a couple of interactive demos. Once you have those ready, you can move on to the next and final step.
Testing
The fifth and final step is testing. This means testing the prototypes you have created in the previous phase on real users. How exactly you do this again depends on the nature of your problem. For example, if you are testing prototypes of your new website, you can use A/B testing to find out to which site users respond best.
Once you understand the design process, you can apply it to business development.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Business Development
Design thinking can be a powerful tool for business development, and it can be applied to medical businesses in a number of ways.
One way to apply design thinking in a medical business is to use it to improve the overall patient experience. This involves understanding the needs and preferences of your patients, identifying pain points and areas for improvement in the patient journey, and prototyping and testing new approaches to address these issues. For example, you might use design thinking to redesign your waiting room to make it more welcoming and calming. This will elevate your customers’ experience and consequently customer retention.
If you want to learn more listen to episode 21 of Medical Entrepreneurs. In this episode, Katie Richardson, CEO of a multi-million dollar company and renowned product designer, explains in great detail how design thinking works and can be used.
If you think you’re ready to start your own journey as a medical entrepreneur, make sure to follow us on social media and subscribe so you never miss an episode!
Additional resources:
– Join my challenge here!
– Check out my website here!
– Sign up for our Aesthetics training here!
Medical Entrepreneur is a podcast dedicated to those who are trying to escape mainstream medicine and start building the healthcare business of their dreams.
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