How Inato builds a platform that is designed around the needs and challenges of doctors worldwide
Inato is firmly committed to developing our clinical trial platform “with doctors and for doctors.” Only with a doctor-centric approach to product development can we dramatically reinvent clinical trials in a way that expands the population of sites engaging in clinical research. Let’s have a look at the product development methodology Inato employs to achieve this goal.
We start with a bold vision and clear business problem. For us, that vision is to enable modern, inclusive clinical trials. And the overarching problem we solve is the fact that only a small fraction of clinical sites are engaged in clinical research.
Our first phase of Discovery is Research and Synthesis . Research can take many forms, but the most significant is usually user research gathered via direct interviews with potential stakeholders. User research is different from validation or usability testing. It is solution-agnostic and focuses on deeply understanding users. At Inato, our research objectives revolve around understanding:
Even though we focus on doctors, user research reaches a broader audience. To get a full understanding of the challenges, we must look at the whole ecosystem. Sites vary in size, clinical research involvement, geography and therapeutic area. Inside sites, doctors work alongside nurses, other medical staff, site administration and others. Throughout the initial Research phase, we speak to close to 100 individuals from all types of sites to make sure we understand all sides.
Once Research is complete, the next task is to synthesize that knowledge and share it with the rest of the company, so everyone benefits from our learnings. In particular, we use personas to summarize our findings and make those findings actionable for product managers, designers and engineers.
Our second phase of Discovery is Ideation and Evaluation . This phase is all about finding and evaluating potential solutions. Evaluation of ideas is ultimately done with prototypes and other experiments that we test in the real world with doctors. The goal is to address what we call value risk or desirability: do they actually want our value proposition? The result of the experiments determines what will be built and what is dropped.
After Discovery , we move to the Delivery phase where products are built, tested and iterated upon based on feedback from users. During Delivery , we focus on making sure the end product is designed and built right. To do that, it’s important to partner with doctors so that usability tests can be performed regularly before shipping the final product. The final touchpoint with users is customer support after launch. Chat support is embedded directly in all our products. This—combined with a very involved customer success team—allows us to stay close to doctors and get the necessary feedback to improve our solutions.
Building a product is a continuous process—there’s always more to do. Interested in giving us your thoughts? We’d love to hear from you. Sign up here to become a partner or to be informed about the progress of our platform.
Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash
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