User case study: Inspiration has been such an important part of my academic career!

Within his current position he looks for relationships between tumour tissue and clinical and cancer outcomes. However his personal passion is designing and delivering better approaches to healthcare; this involves a lot of planning and mapping and getting groups together and helping them to visualise what’s going on. Which is where Inspiration helps! Joe said: “Sitting down with a group of people to plan out a research project its easy to get lost and lose track, and so using Inspiration to help is so quick especially with the RapidFire feature.”

How long have you been using Inspiration?

“I was first introduced to Inspiration 20 years ago, possibly longer. So, here in this province we were creating an integrated program for hip and knee surgery which is a very common surgery, so there was a huge backlog, and it was all fragmented with the different cities in the province and the different surgeons with different approaches to it. And a colleague of mine at the time, a pHD psychologist, was using Inspiration. We’d be in a room with dozens of people from surgery, from nursing, from administration and all these ideas would be flying around and he’d come up with something that was organized and then he’d put it up at the next meeting, printed in big posters, that went all the way around the room and people could just walk along and the follow the different processes and with their markers write in what was working, what was right and what was wrong. And, so ultimately thats how our provincial bone and joint program came about. And this guy, Doug Smith introduced me to Inspiration. And so I started to use it in my own research when I started to redesign how we manage head and neck cancer surgery, and we put together a pathway that we started using in 2010. It took a couple of years to design it, but same process and bringing these posters over to the hospital and the nurses would look at it and they would mark it up and I’d take it back and revise it. And it proved to be very useful because people can follow it. It’s a good engagement tool because people can see it without reading through ten pages! And with a big, mixed audience you don’t know what challenges different people have, so to assume that everybody can read pages and pages of text or assimilate it. It level sets. Nobody minds the pictures!” "

I’m using it currently for some projects - coding manuals and data dictionaries - and I find that Inspiration is not a bad way to organise that, because you can embed your notes and text and everything else.”

What are the challenges Inspiration helps you with?

“When you have these groups of people from different backgrounds and you're talking about changing how they do their jobs it’s a bit like herding cats. Inspiration is kind of like a jazzed-up white board where you can do stuff that enables it to be captured and communicated electronically. So, it was simplifying the interactions and the process of getting people to agree. And when I saw Doug do his work with these large groups, I thought ‘Man, this is a tool I need to learn to use!’”

What are your favourite features?

"I use Inspiration to organize content. Sometimes during the RapidFire process you’re just spitting stuff out but it has no structure to it, and I don’t even want to worry about the structure during the creative process; it would hold you back! So, when I sit down later ultimately I have to produce a document so I use it actually as an outlining tool.

I’ve used it for writing research grants for example where I need to include particular headings - the background, the budget, the methods and all that stuff - and I can start to map it out that way. But ultimately I need to turn it into a document that I have to share with people and it’s really useful for just writing!”

“I don’t know what your competition is but any alternatives I’ve explored just don’t seem to be quite the same!” “I use the little different icons and sometimes there isn’t something there for me but it’s pretty easy to bring in my own photographs and stuff, so I’ve tweaked that a little bit.”

Joe remarked that Inspiration has been an important part of his academic career and said: “It’s really helped me communicate some of the design changes and process engineering changes that we need to look at doing, so it’s been super helpful for that!”

And he finished up by saying: “I really think the group you guys have put together is really helpful’ I’ve always had the feeling that the people I’m emailing really want to help me solve my problem!”

Harnessing the power of Inspiration to design and deliver better healthcare!

Inspiration user, Joe Dort is a former head and neck surgeon, an Emeritus professor, and now a clinical researcher at University of Calgary, Alberta.

Previously, Joe was responsible for removing cancers from the ear, nose, throat and neck area and has, more recently, been involved with creating and leading a clinical effectiveness research program. And he relies on Inspiration to help him!