MD+DI reached out to Product Creation Studio to ask about the past year’s biggest medtech engineering challenges and whether remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic added to the challenge. Our team and other industry stakeholders shared their thoughts for a recently-published slideshow.

The question:

What was your biggest medtech engineering challenge over the last year, and how did you solve it? Did remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic add to the challenge, or not?

Blake Stancik, VP of Operations

“Operationally, 2020 created a huge team communication challenge for Product Creation Studio and our clients. Our 'studio' concept is founded on the principle that there are no walls between team members, so by all means, come by and let’s have a conversation. In March 2020, COVID came and the walls quickly rose tall. Small and large project teams all started working from home and the Zoom era began. 

It’s not digital conferencing that saved our project offering, however. It was an investment in business intelligence (BI) — digital tools that allow collaborative sharing, document building, and the reviewing of work in progress. It’s not digital conferencing that saved our project offering, however. It was an investment in business intelligence (BI) — digital tools that allow collaborative sharing, document building, and the reviewing of work in progress. Do you send Word documents via email, have multiple contributors download, resubmit, and then merge the documents manually? That is the definition of insanity if you continue the practice. Why not have an online version, point to the reference, and then have multiple writers or reviewers in the document at once? Online versioning can track all the changes and you can see who did what. Even more important are the digital comments that discuss targeted items of interest by tagging the KOLs. This gets an email to the right contributors and a link that shows the exact contractual information in proper context. No more hunting and pecking to get on the same page with your client or boss. 

If your group hasn’t committed to these tools, it’s a wise investment that will quickly pay back in spades. Today we still primarily work from home, but with fewer walls than we had in March 2020. Now, our team is really clicking.”

Scott Thielman, Chief Technology Officer

“The collection of user needs is greatly complicated by social isolation. Heading into 2020, we had human factors contracts focused on discovery of needs and opportunities within surgical specialties. Coronavirus threw a huge wrench in these efforts as travel and face-to-face interviews became impossible. Some planned projects were driven into limbo and others to online formats not typically preferred by usability experts.

As with medicine and commuting, user research may never be the same after the pandemic. HF researchers will lean on the tools they were forced to use in a stop-gap fashion to gather more data earlier and faster. A Zoom meeting can’t replace a hands on interview, but we have found that valuable inputs can still be gathered. Experiential prototypes can be shipped and interviews conducted; it’s just different now.”

Take a look at MD+DI’s full slideshow with more insights from the industry.