Product Clinic #2: Using feedback loops to build better products

Lindus Health has set out to efficiently deliver end-to-end clinical trials for sponsors. In this blog post, we want to share how our team builds products to make trials transformationally faster and more predictable.

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Clinical trials are a complex process. If you asked us who our ‘users’ are, we could send you a list: nurses, medical doctors, participants, radiologists, auditors, sponsor executives and so on. How do we ensure that the products we build meet the needs of all these users?

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To understand how we do this, it helps to know how we are organised internally. Lindus Health trial delivery team is split into two core functions: Product & Technology (Product) and Clinical Operations (Clin-Ops).

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The Product team’s mission is to help all stakeholders involved in a clinical study have the best possible experience. This involves high-fidelity user experience, integrated data pipelines and validated technology. Above all however, building products for clinical operations people requires a deep understanding of the underlying processes of clinical research.

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The Clin-Ops team spend much of their time working with sponsors and clinical staff in order to reliably deliver on the objectives set out by the trial protocol. Our Clin-ops team members have deep experience in the industry, with intuitions and habits built over years of exposure to industry nuances.

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Feedback loops

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When building technology, we might get too distracted with implementation details and forget that we are building products for real people with busy lives. Luckily we have amazing people on our Clin-Ops team who do their best to inform the Product team on what the different stakeholders need to make clinical research fast and effective. Therefore we turn our team members into model users who give invaluable feedback.

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We use multiple types of communication channels: in-person chats, interviews, Q&A sessions, prototype demos and something as simple as Slack mentions. All of these help the Product team have near instant feedback and input on key decisions that impact our company long into the future.

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Move fast, don’t break things

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Clinical research is a very interesting space to build products for. On the one hand, we have an advantage in that most of the likely scenarios of different type clinical interventions have been pre-defined. The flip side of this is that we risk learning poor UX habits if we lean entirely on how things have been done in the past.

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The cohesion between our Product and Clin-Ops teams helps us benefit from knowing what’s standard and non-negotiable, but also to challenge conventions that might be outdated. The first few years in a product lifecycle are tough as teams discover core pain points and opportunities in the space. Our amazing Clin-Ops team helps us shorten those timescales.

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Conclusion

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Lindus Health is ultimately driven by a passion to help innovative companies run faster, more reliable and patient-friendly clinical trials. We do this by building efficient internal feedback loops so that our product takes the best inputs to solve the hardest problems we face as a technology company.

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(If you found this interesting, check out the previous post in the Product Clinic series: Favor boring technology.)

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Nijat Hasanli - Head of Product- Lindus Health

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