Alcon is the global leader in eye care, dedicated to helping people see brilliantly. With an over 75-year heritage, we are the largest eye care device company in the world, with complementary businesses in Surgical and Vision Care.
The original scope was to 'align and harmonize the design of their portfolio', Alcon's Next Generation Surgical Suite (NGSS), which was a desperate experience resulting from Alcon's acquisition of its competitor's products.
Partway through the engagement, we uncovered other, more impactful problems we could solve for. We shared our observations at the project's midpoint presentation, along with possible solutions. Alcon pushed for a change order.
The updated problem to solve became:
'Existing complexities inhibit the operational workflows, which will improve: information availability, surgical outcomes, and the overall experience for doctors, their team, and their patients'.
Goals:
Investigate the current state, and harmonize the Cataract-Refractive suite into a common user experience communicated via a Proof of Concept.
My role:
Design and research team lead. Lead and manage the solution design. Co-creation and design sprint facilitator. Product strategist.
Observations:
|A| The surgical experience journey shared was inaccurate. |B| Each surgeon uses a different planning process. |C| The plan (surgical) depends heavily on human input and accuracy. |D| The plan focuses solely on IOL selection. |E| The plan accurately predicts IOL choice <50% of the time. |F| Surgery centers blend a just-in-time / consignment model for IOL inventory. |G| Staff and surgeons continually conform to multiple experiences across settings and machines. |H| Each procedure requires widespread collaboration. |I| Dispersed data across the workflow limits productivity and access to insights.
Solutions:
|A| The journey was remapped to include the patient. |B| Developed a standard surgery planning process that follows the patient from the initial intake to post-surgery follow-ups. |C| Allow the plan to include input based on human experience. |D| Reduced the need to focus on IOL selection and more on patient outcome. |E| Develop tools to increase the accuracy of the IOL choice based on additional factors. |F| Introduce an IOL 5-pack as a critical part of the planning. |G| Introduced standard vocabularies and values for equipment procedures and settings. |H| The solution supports departmental and role-based collaboration. |I| Improve data interpretation during and after surgery.
Results:
|1| The updated journey reduced time and enabled team collaboration. |2| The IOL (Intraocular Lens) accuracy was mitigate by producing a 5-box (the target lens, and two lenses above and below the target lens) for pre-surgery inventory. |3| Hardware functional redundancies could be removed to reduce clinical costs. |4| The plan was integrated into the software of each machine, which accomplished Alcon's original goal and provided cross-platform and multi-user access for better collaboration. |5| A new business model was presented to the executive team that proposed a SaaS service offering that could decrease the manufacturing of surgical equipment. |6| This project resulted in three additional engagements, one of which included testing the NGSS solution with KOLs at an annual ophthalmology convention.
Activities and Artifacts:
Stakeholder interviews, contextual observational studies (patients, clinical teams, surgeons, and surgery), competitive landscape analysis, journey maps, user archetypes, five-day design sprint, interaction models, entity diagrams, logical architecture, prototype, pilot feedback sessions.
