Transforming Healthcare With Design Thinking: A Workshop for Medical Directors with Ty Hagler, Founder and Principal at Trig

[00:00:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.

[00:00:25] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket Founder Stories. I am here with the outstanding Ty Hagler. He is the Founder and Principal at Trig.

[00:00:42] If you haven't heard of Trig, they're an award-winning innovation and design firm that offers clients guided experience in building a culture of innovation, understanding customer needs, designing successful products. They're just outstanding at what they do in the space. And so we're going to have a great discussion with Ty about his company, what they do and his founder story. So Ty, thanks so much for joining us today. Oh, hey Saul. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:10] I've been a long time fan of the Outcomes Rocket Podcast. Hey man, really appreciate it. And look, to kick things off, I'd love to just kind of get a little more about you. And then once you share that, talk to us about your company. Talk to us about what you do. How is it different? And why does it matter? Okay, sure. My background, undergraduate degree is in industrial design from Georgia Tech and graduated in 2003.

[00:01:38] And then I did well enough at the sport of flat water kayaking to qualify for the Olympic Job Opportunities Program for Home Depot. So I was an Olympic hopeful athlete back in the day. That was my first career. Right. So got into Home Depot's in-house innovation department and really had a chance to work on just about anything that wasn't a commodity at Home Depot. So that was early days for me of being an aspiring young industrial designer.

[00:02:06] And then as 2008 started rolling around, things weren't looking so good for the housing market. And also my wife finished up her PhD at Georgia Tech. We had the opportunity to move up here to the triangle where we're based out of with our family in North Carolina.

[00:02:22] And so I had a chance to go back to school, get my MBA at NC State, and then also start Trig, which really was built on a lot of the lessons learned from working at Home Depot and understanding how mass retail works from an innovation standpoint. But also really wanted to look at and got my first exposure to medical devices through the innovation lab at NC State.

[00:02:44] And so that's where I really started to build up an interest and understanding, but also pull some of the design thinking principles from my background as an industrial designer into the process. And we've had some really great projects come out of that as a result of our work. Well, that's really fascinating work. Never knew the Home Depot bit there, Ty. So fascinating to hear where we all get our experiences from. What end customer do you serve in the healthcare ecosystem? Sure.

[00:03:12] So our primary, I guess, persona is the medical innovator. Somebody who, let's say they've got a clinical background, either a doctor or a nurse or respiratory therapist, let's say, and they've got an idea and they're really not quite sure what they want to do next. I think they need a prototype.

[00:03:33] And so a lot of what we offer through our program is, of course, the early like prototyping work that you need to de-risk that project. But then also we offer training and we call it the med design training where they start off understanding the kind of the superpower of any medical innovator is to, to identify and support the unmet need.

[00:03:58] And we offer training and how to go through and support that, build that up and prioritize that. And that really becomes the North Star. And it's oftentimes the skill set that gets taken for granted. But if you look at the maturity of any medical device, the degree to which you have a foundation in a clear understanding and clinical evidence for the unmet need, that then gives you the entire reason to exist as a company.

[00:04:23] And also the filter is you have the ebbs and flows of technology and what you can and can't do with a given solution. But having that North Star of really understanding the problem, being a champion of that is a core part of our training. So that's a lot of what we offer in the earliest stages. And then I'm also working with one of our clients at late stage where we're at commercialization. That's for a company called Couplet Care, which is a infant bassinet that specifically designed this as a third generation bassinet over my shoulder here.

[00:04:53] But it's specifically designed for postpartum mothers in the hospital where they can't physically access their infant due to the current bassinet design. This bassinet is custom designed to cantilever over the bed. And it's the only bassinet on the market that allows for a mom to access her infant without a second adult in the room. All the others require some kind of intervention because mom's elbows don't go like this if they're sitting in the bed. So that's been something we've been super proud of.

[00:05:21] And we've been doing a lot of the late stage work with them of getting ready for commercialization. So it's been super fun to see that project from inception at the earliest days. And then, of course, been calling it a overnight success. But that's been seven years in the making. So we're seeing it starting to hit the market now, which is really exciting. That's super cool. And oftentimes these design opportunities are missed just because of legacy products. And it seems like this one makes a ton of sense.

[00:05:50] And for innovators out there, Ty, I was just thinking like even somebody at a large established medical device company, say in like product development or product marketing could benefit from your course. Has anybody done that? Or is it more early stage people? The course was developed. So we ran our first run of this content with a corporate team.

[00:06:14] So we had 20 or 30 marketers and engineers go through this course in order to better understand how to make sure you center the end user, the stakeholder in your design process. So we started off as a two to three day workshop with the content. We then, during COVID, reconfigured it as part of a grant with UNC Chapel Hill and workforce engagement to engage clinicians in the design thinking course. So we ran our first pass at this.

[00:06:43] All three teams that started the course finished it, even though we were at the height of COVID and the doctors were getting pulled into the clinic on a very high stress basis. They still finished the course because of the content was so engaging. And so we've been, we're currently in our ninth iteration, our ninth cohort of the training where, yeah, we have established corporate teams that go through it, but then we also make it available to individual contributors. And it's really something we can scale up or down.

[00:07:08] Actually, one of the things we're getting ready to do is run a version of this workshop with the National Health Council, which is a nonprofit that aggregates a lot of the patient advocacy organizations like the American Heart Association. And they've got a member list of about 150 plus different nonprofit advocacy organizations.

[00:07:26] At their Science of Patient Engagement Symposium in DC, we're going to be running a three-hour workshop with, say, the medical directors of some of these different organizations to really walk them through what this process looks like. So you can make sure you center the patient at the very beginning and have an appropriate engagement with that. Because so often, I think according to these patient advocacy groups, the patients are an afterthought.

[00:07:53] And I think we saw that play out with the infant bassinet because the most advanced bassinets that are currently on the market are designed for the comfort of the clinician. And then the real deep understanding of what moms are going through, particularly when their partner has left the room and they're alone by themselves with the infant, that's not something that's well understood in the literature. We're very fortunate to have a great collaborator there. And it's good to be able to highlight that and really speak to a full empathetic understanding of what patients are going through.

[00:08:22] Yeah, that's fantastic, Ty. And I really appreciate the concrete examples. You know, what's one thing most people don't know about the problem you solve? Well, there's a couple of things that I've tried to wrap concepts around. One is my favorite concept is cost per lesson learned. Which, right? So you think about the innovation and efficiency are two opposing ideas. The more innovative you are, the less efficient you are.

[00:08:50] The more efficient you are, the less innovative you are. There's no such thing as innovative efficiency or efficient innovation. It's just you're trying to combine. It's like what strategic planning. Like that's an oxymoron in its own right. So if you're trying to measure how effective your innovation process is, I like cost per lesson learned.

[00:09:09] Because you can spend $500 million developing a full robotic system and then go get feedback from hospitals of whether they would buy it and then have to shut the program down. That happens in big med tech all the time. Or you could figure out what is the lowest cost way to test that. And oftentimes the easiest thing you can do is a sticky note. Like a sticky note qualifies as a prototype. And you can go test an idea with a sticky note.

[00:09:38] So your cost per lesson learned there is the appropriate metric if you're learning the same lesson between different levels of resolution there. And so that's one that I try to infuse is you want to learn your lessons as early in the process through sketches and sticky notes and phone models and all of that, which is germane to the industrial designer skill set. But I think it's too easy to look at progress as validation of the market because, yes, you can get a patent.

[00:10:07] That makes no bearing whatsoever on whether or not people would use it. You just got a patent on balloons on your head. You paid a tax to earn a monopoly on potentially a dumb idea. The same way, the same goes for the FDA. Like getting clearance from the FDA doesn't tell you market validation. It just means you've cleared a barrier to entry. So I think it's important to distinguish where you're making progress from a commercialization standpoint versus where you're just clearing some of those barriers to entry. Those are two separate metrics of success.

[00:10:36] So cost per lesson learned is one of my favorite metrics. And so anyway, there's a couple of those that are out there. I think that's awesome, Ty. It's the first time I've heard that. And I really love it. And I love this idea of a post-it as a prototype. We really have to think lightly, right? And like, how can we get our ideas out into the world? And as light as possible, get that feedback and really start that iteration as early as possible, right? Yeah.

[00:11:06] Yeah, absolutely. You still have to, from a patent standpoint, make sure you're not doing a disclosure, public disclosure of your ideas. But as long as you're doing that within a intellectual property-controlled environment where people are signing non-disclosure agreements, then especially for those early formative days, you can go out and test your ideas cost-effectively. Or even one of my favorite books on the topic is called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

[00:11:34] And his whole concept is that if you ask somebody what they think about your idea, they will lie to you. Just like if you ask your mom, like, hey, what do you think about my new startup idea? She'll say, oh, honey, that sounds great. Yes, you should do it. And then you come to find out later that nobody actually wants to do it. Your mom just doesn't want to hurt your ego. And so if you're going out and testing the unmet need and saying, how severe is this unmet need? Is there a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?

[00:12:03] Are we truly solving for a problem? Or are we just falling in love with the new robotic-enabled AI, blockchain, whatever tech du jour thing that we're excited about? But we're not actually solving for a problem. I think that's how you can truly validate things. And if you happen to have a few sticky notes with you or throwaway ideas, I have repurposed old prototypes from defunct startups as a way of just testing an idea. Hey, we've got this magic imaginary thing. And let's say we can do this. What would happen here?

[00:12:33] And that's been a great way just to validate what the experience is in a tangible context. So there's all kinds of ways of doing that. One of my other favorite prototype techniques is either called a shop-and-chop or boomerang prototype, where you're just pulling something off the market and say off-label use, let's say, and making it so far off-label where you're asking for some imagination, but it does help to have a prop in order to start to simulate that.

[00:13:01] And then you only have the cost of whatever you had to buy the thing retail at to then start to experiment with it and get that valuable insight before you then invest in a prototype bill, which is easily 10 to 20x what the cost of a retail product is. So there's a lot of tips and tricks like that to get feedback from the market quickly and cost-effectively. I think that's so great, Ty, and super valuable for any medtech innovator out there,

[00:13:29] either thinking about working on an idea to solve a problem or in the middle of it. So really fantastic. Thank you for that. We like to learn from successful people. What's your favorite business resource or business hack that you'd recommend to our listeners and why? Oh, okay. Goodness. It depends on the topic. I'm a voracious reader in my own right.

[00:13:53] So for founders, specifically, I love the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, because if you're trying to figure out how to run a business from an envelope system, basically, so that you're not getting out over your skis, but you're making sure that you're maintaining costs within the revenues that you have coming in. And that's one of my favorite books and systems for just operating a business.

[00:14:18] I mentioned the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick earlier in terms of going out and getting customer feedback in an entrepreneur-friendly way, so that you're also making forward progress if you're needing to find those early customers, those early investors. That's a very pragmatic and helpful resource. So I'll leave it there at those two books. There's a ton more in my library, and I usually have a bunch that I'm recommending. I love that. I haven't gotten to either of those, and certainly two that will definitely want to check out.

[00:14:46] And so, look, I love this time with you. You've given us a lot to think about, Ty. Something you said resonated with one of the medtech innovators out there. What's the best place for them to reach out to you to learn more? LinkedIn is the best way to find me and engage with me. So it's just Ty Hagler on LinkedIn, so look me up. And then also you can find out more about my company, trig.com, which it's fun to have that domain name.

[00:15:15] I love it, Ty. Well, look, folks, invaluable conversation. I think this conversation can save you millions of dollars and bring down your cost per lesson learned to very minimal if you do it right. I'm certainly leaving away with some great pearls here.

[00:15:34] So check out the show notes, get your post-it, write a note yourself there, but get in touch with Ty because there's some big opportunities here to take what you're doing to the next level. Thank you all for tuning in. And Ty, thanks for being with us. Oh, thank you, Saul. It's been a pleasure.

[00:16:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945. That's a lovely display. Bye.