Week 12: Last Week of Interviews!

In our last week of interviews, we presented our product for the military use case after learning that while the dual use case could be viable in the future, it would cost too much for us to deploy it in the commercial marketplace. This highlighted some other avenues for us to gather and consolidate information into our product, such as health plans like Kaiser Permanente which hold medical provider information for their own customers. Thinking through these alternate sources, we know that people generally desire sharing  medical asset information more freely than they do other kinds of data, but we need to outline strategies for obtaining data regardless- and compiling it into our product in a way that improves its accessibility compared to the way it is accessed right now. In the future it would probably be more helpful to partner with the holders of this information directly to upload it onto our source, but again we need to decide how to approach that strategically and consider if it might be possible to generate revenue from this.

Interview #1: Jennifer, Company Physician (New User)

• Jennifer graduated from SOCM in 2016 and has a medical degree from Vanderbilt University. She is currently working with Thai medics on a joint combined training exercise in Asia.
• Thoughts on acquiring users:
  • Suggests looking into consumer market for inspiration. How did Uber or Lyft or Tinder handle location services.
  • Concerned about the compliance/legal components to the app
  • Some degree of uncertainty with the app being used with untrained users. What could go wrong if used improperly?
• Fan of the concept but cautious on the widespread adoption. Considers the app useful for most medics who are willing to adopt more tech in their regimen

Interview #2: Josh, 18D (SOCM instructor) transitioned from Navy SWCC (Repeat)

• Josh has deep knowledge into the medic training schema as a SOCM instructor. He works with the foreign medics to train them on US standards.
• Thoughts on cost/resources:
  • Interested in seeing if data sources can be linked to NCBI or NIH pipeline to integrate with existing data
  • Wondering if incentivizing current vendors of 18Ds would be beneficial. Palantir is a good example of a vendor that has done it right. Partnership opportunity here.
• Hesitant to say he would believe the data without understanding a clear system of validation and quality metrics instilled that feeds back to US establishments.

Interview #3: Karl, Implementation Architect, Raytheon (Tech Expert)

• Karl is currently with Raytheon working with the small liabilities innovations group that funds small pilots for the military in ad-hoc projects.
• Thoughts on overall strategy:
  • Are there health plans or provider groups that have established systems that are willing to donate data? Suggested Kaiser Permanente as an example.
  • Concerned with issues when crowdsourcing goes wrong. Likes the concept to keep costs low but what if it goes unregulated? Could lead to massive litigation downstream
  • Would want a feature that allows one to “bookmark” certain assets that are working right or have high satisfaction ratings
• Suggests running a focus group to test the functions and really focus on “breaking” the app to anticipate potential weaknesses proactively.

Interview #4: Jon, 17 years as Special Forces Medical Sergeant and now instructor of 18D/SOIDC refresher course (Repeat)

• Can you show me how the search capability would work? Right now, I can search an area for medical assets, but can I actually search through the feedback?
• Even for deployment within the military you may need to think about some kind of knowledge management system
  • Mentioned the user profile rewards, but who would you have kind of verifying the data as you go along?
  • For starting out on the military side, would recommend just building out from the open-source information that we already use like the CDC sources
    • to provide proof of concept in this way rather than in the commercial way you need to have information on it- relying on 18D’s would take too long for small deployment

Interview #5: Xiuyuan Hao, Surgeon of international aid team in Morocco (Repeated)

• Compared with assessments made by medical faculties, the assessments made by patients (public users) are less reliable and accurate
• It’s important to make this app usable to the doctors who make the assessments.
• How to deal with the conflict assessment could be the next step.

Interview #6: Sam,

• The medical asset info is something that needs to be verified by military personnel
  • There should be an icon that shows verification by the military (other verification itself might not be considered trustworthy for our standards)
• Would like to see what the user component would look like

Interview #7: Kirk, Former 18D/JSOC Regional Team Lead

• To leverage user profiles, definitely continue using the game aspect to verify these medical assessments
  • You can allow options of contact information (like Craigslist email) if it is just for the military use case
• You may need someone monitoring the feature-based asset search because the features that matter might change every so often
  • Especially for the information on there that is crowdsourced because you want it to be the most accurate and helpful it can be
  • Standardizing the level of information that is provided (across crowdsourced and across the NGO sources) would be a step up from current sources like Lonely Planet
• Most NGOs will be open to partnerships that help spread medical information like the WHO
  • It’s a platform that will help them too
  • Purely for information sharing
  • Some NGO’s *might* not be completely ok with the military flavor, like maybe Red Cross

Interview #8, Chandler, 18D, Repeat User (haven’t spoken to since the first week)

• Thought it was a “really good idea”, had some data and security concerns about the product which was understandable because we hadn’t talked to him since January.
  • He liked the idea of open source – “hide the noise”
  • Liked that it was adaptable for his personal devices
• Tried to make an ArcGIS account just so he could mess with the application

 

Interview #9, Stephen, Retired Army Surgeon (Repeat)

• Thought it was a very cool concept and liked the user interface
• He travels a lot and would like to see the hospitals in neighboring countries

Interview #10, Dave, CSM (Repeat)

• Wants there to be upload and download capabilities with low bandwidth, still be able to use the overlay features but may be more raw data
• Huge application for this with NGOs and sees more of an advantage with on the ground use
• Rethink using ArcGIS potentially work with ATAK – He’s going to connect us in order to get the ball rolling on this
• Said people seem excited about this