Eisai Canada convened a 3-day virtual Mind Meeting (alignment sprint) to make MRI readiness for repeat monitoring actionable for Leqembi (lecanemab), bringing the end-to-end stakeholder ecosystem into one working session. The virtual format was intentionally designed to sustain engagement and drive convergence.
Rather than treating government funding as the only lever, participants surfaced system constraints and generated solutions across workforce, process, technology, and standards—then converged on 19 practical recommendations. The group then prioritized those recommendations through a structured voting exercise, creating a clear, shared set of ranked priorities for action.
At a glance
- Format: 3-day virtual Mind Meeting, convening pan-Canadian participants from BC to Québec in one “room”
- Focus: MRI access and readiness for repeat monitoring for early Alzheimer’s patients
- Participants: 28 total. Eisai team plus external “village” of clinicians, imaging leaders, MRTs, patient advocates, and policy experts
- Outputs: 180 issues identified, 125 solutions brainstormed, consolidated into 19 recommendations
- How the work was finalized: Participants ranked the recommendations by expected impact, producing a clear set of priorities.
- What this delivered: A ranked list of the 19 recommendations (by participant vote), creating shared clarity on what matters most. A separate action-planning sprint can assign owners and convert priorities into a 30/60/90 (not held in this engagement).
Pain points this Mind Meeting addressed
- MRI readiness was “distributed”: capacity, booking rules, protocols, reporting, and handoffs sat with different owners across sites and provinces
- “Wait time” data didn’t explain throughput: the real constraints were workflow design, prioritization rules, and report turnaround for repeat monitoring
- Variability across jurisdictions: what worked in one province or centre did not translate cleanly to another without adaptation
- Execution risk at handoffs: without explicit owners and clear handoffs, the pathway breaks between ordering, booking, scanning, interpreting, and follow-up
The situation
Eisai was preparing for Alzheimer’s disease–modifying therapy delivery in a system where diagnostic and monitoring pathways are fragmented and capacity-constrained. The operational risk was straightforward: if monitoring MRIs cannot be delivered reliably, eligible patients may be delayed or denied treatment—not because the therapy fails, but because the system cannot run the required workflow at scale.
The deeper risk was more subtle: teams can mistake partial indicators (headline “wait times,” local anecdotes, isolated department views) for readiness. In reality, MRI readiness is governed by interdependent constraints across the pathway: referral patterns, prioritization rules, booking constraints (including serial scans), staffing patterns, protocol consistency, reporting turnaround, and coordination across handoffs.
What the team needed
Eisai didn’t need another expert input session. They needed expert help coordinating a complex stakeholder ecosystem—people who each own a piece of the pathway—to produce a plan that could actually be executed in Canada. Practically, that meant:
- Make the “black box” legible (end-to-end, not a single department)
- Identify solutions beyond funding (workflow and implementation levers)
- Clarify roles, decision points, and handoff points across the village
- Leave with decision-grade recommendations, prioritized for implementation
- Set up a follow-on action-planning sprint to assign owners, handoffs, and a 30/60/90 first wave (if/when required)
Why a Mind Meeting (not an ad board or roundtable)
Advisory boards are strong when you need a focused slice of expert input. Stakeholder roundtables can be valuable when you need broad perspectives and coalition legitimacy.
Eisai’s constraint was different: execution depends on a distributed pathway with fragile handoffs, and the highest-leverage fixes require trade-offs and prioritization—work that rarely fits in a 2–3 hour discussion format. A Mind Meeting is designed for this job:
- Working time (~16 hours) that enables iteration, not just discussion
- Full “village” coverage (end-to-end pathway representation)
- A structured, de-biased decision process that surfaces constraints early and tests trade-offs and prioritization
- Decision-grade deliverables: 19 recommendations, prioritized by the full village, ready for translation into a 30/60/90 plan with owners and handoffs (follow-on)
WHY THIS IS DIFFERENT
Decision-grade, not discussion. This wasn’t a set of perspectives or themes. The work converged into a decision log and a prioritized recommendation set: clear “what moves first,” explicit trade-offs, and a practical set of priorities and dependencies that can be translated into owned implementation planning.
Ecosystem in one room. MRI readiness is end-to-end. By convening the roles that actually run the pathway, the group tested feasibility in real time—what breaks, where, and why—rather than debating readiness from partial internal assumptions.
Prioritize for momentum. The output was not ‘the whole roadmap.’ It was a ranked set of moves the ecosystem could stand behind now, plus the key dependencies surfaced so a sponsor team can build an owned implementation plan if/when required.
Make the black box testable. The sprint turned hidden workflow, capacity, and governance constraints into a shared model teams can use—so readiness becomes testable (and improvable) rather than a debate about wait-times, anecdotes, or policy aspirations.
What we did
MMG ran a Mind Meeting using iterative ABC cycles:
- Analyze: map issues, bottlenecks, and handoffs across the real readiness workflow
- Brainstorm: generate options that respect on-the-ground constraints
- Choose: converge, cluster, and prioritize into a ranked set of recommendations
The method mattered because it prevented predictable failure modes: advocating for funding as the default answer, optimizing one node in the pathway while breaking another, or producing high-level themes without prioritization and a clear path to action.
Solutions beyond funding
The workshop deliberately avoided a single-track answer of “wait for the next budget.” The recommendations span near-term levers that health systems and partners can start within existing operating constraints, while also informing longer-term funding discussions.
- Workforce: strengthen MRT pipeline and retention, reduce barriers to entry, and improve role design so existing scanners can run closer to potential.
- Technology and process: reduce no-shows, streamline booking and communication, adopt shorter follow-up protocols where clinically appropriate, and improve throughput through workflow redesign and targeted automation.
- Standards and care-model: align radiology standards and protocols for DMT monitoring in the Canadian context, then disseminate and operationalize them so practice is consistent across sites.
- Accountability and measurement: define dementia-relevant indicators and governance so improvements survive handoffs and progress can be tracked.
- Patient navigation: equip patients and caregivers to understand the journey, timelines, and self-advocacy needs, reducing friction that compounds delays.
Dr. Sandra Black
Neurologist & Senior Scientist, Sunnybrook
What Eisai got
By the end of the Mind Meeting, Eisai had more than themes. The outputs were designed to survive handoffs across the village and support execution planning:
- A de-risked “MRI black box”: a shared, end-to-end view of where capacity and workflow break down across booking, protocols, scan execution, and reporting
- A solution set that goes beyond funding: practical levers across workforce, technology, process design, standards, and accountability
- A decision-ready recommendation set: 19 recommendations consolidated from 125 solution options, then prioritized by the full village through voting
- Momentum and legitimacy: cross-silo alignment and documented buy-in that makes it easier to convene follow-on working groups and move from debate to execution
Why this generalizes beyond Alzheimer’s
MRI readiness for DMTs behaves like many complex therapy launches: multiple dependent steps, constrained specialized capacity, and handoffs across organizations. The same approach applies wherever monitoring, diagnostics, site readiness, or staffing become pathway constraints—and where “more funding” is not the only (or fastest) unlock.
If your launch outcomes depend on constrained capacity and multi-party execution—not just messaging and materials—a Mind Meeting is designed to turn the black box into a decision-grade first wave plan.