The goal

Week 4 of Problem Exploration had one main objective:

• Get a validated Moonshot

How were we supposed to get there?

We left the previous week on Friday with a list of 15 potential problems, scattered around three main subjects: Hospitals, Long-Term Care facilities and pharmacies.

We started the week going down two different directions:

• talking to both operators (nurses, pharmacists etc) and executives in the industry (Doctors, Big pharma employees and University researchers)
• gaining a better and more comprehensive overview of the inefficiencies and problems we had listed by completing our secondary research

What happened in the meanwhile?

It turned out that even though the problems we had previously identified were actually perceived by many in the industry, our list was not at all comprehensive. In fact, many other problems that we had not yet encountered emerged, which resulted in a bit of chaos and confusion with regards to the process we were following.

Hence, we decided to take a step back and reflect on the three subjects we had started to deep dive into  - hospitals, private pharmacies and long-term care facilities. At the end, we decided to focus our effort in the pharmacy world. This decision was mainly driven by:

• Hospitals being majorly public entities (70%)
• Long term care facilities not perceiving the pain as strong as the other subjects

Eventually, pharmacies took the win.

In addition to the size, we realized that pharmacies are in the middle of a paradigm shift. They are progressively becoming health institutions rather than drug stores, with technology slowly entering the field.

Problems we are currently exploring in this transition are: