Improving Patient Care With a Startup Product Mindset
By Justin Reyes Despite her background as a doctor, who has been trained at several large academic institutions throughout the country, Mima Geere saw …
By Justin Reyes
Despite her background as a doctor, who has been trained at several large academic institutions throughout the country, Mima Geere saw a huge need for innovative software design in the medical industry.
She realized during her training that there were multiple areas of care that needed a new way of thinking, and sadly innovating in the most needy areas of medicine rarely ever happened. The task requires people that care and have medical expertise. It also requires a chain of of buy-in starting with nurses, then on to hospital administrators, in-house lawyers, and many others before it can be deemed useful. Mima believes approach can be likened to a grassroots campaign.
Inspired by the wave of startups in the Bay area, Mima, joined a team of technology experts, lending them her domain expertise as a consultant, as they were trying to solve medical problems. But she soon realized she needed to understand the intricacies of product development as she was often left feeling disconnected from the heart of the product.
I felt that I couldn’t communicate the needs effectively without knowing all the pieces of product development.
In the last hours before the course deadline, Mima submitted her application for Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course, and was accepted. The classes fell after work hours and were easy to attend in their online format. Through the lectures, Mima was comforted by the framework of the course that encouraged her that she can start very simply early.
Mima demonstrated this during her lab assignment in the course where she had to share her “Minimum Viable Product” with the rest of the students.
I began to understand that there was a huge diversity of Minimum Viable Products that you can build. The trick was just figuring out what the smallest MVP can you build right away to get traction.
Besides understanding the development of a product for an early stage startup, Mima saw value in understanding the perspectives of engineers and project managers in order to speak the same language.
Poornima shared with me that you really needed to know who you want to work with in a company and understand the initial thinking and workflow of engineers.
Mima is excited about the progress and direction that the product is headed in. Since taking the course she mentioned that she would have not been in the direction she is now without the knowledge and recommendations she has received from the Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course.
If I didn’t take the course, I would have a lot of assumptions that I wouldn’t have understood and also I would have understood the value of trying to understand the users.
Mima encourages all her friends to take the course to learn how to take their ideas and transform them into a product as well as learning how to make a profit from it. Most of all, Mima highly recommends Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course to other female physicians who need the motivation to know that they too can do it themselves, and that the tools are out there to help them accomplish the necessary changes needed in medical care.
