GE's Radiology Desktop

Imaging Desktop environment: including Workflow Manager and Universal Viewer.

The Project & the Challenge

Workflow Manager is the flagship software product developed jointly between UPMC Enterprises and GE Healthcare.

Workflow Manager is part of GE's Imaging Desktop suite, which enables radiologists to select, read, view, and dictate imaging exams and diagnose patients across their hospital system. The application contains multiple, complex workflows and features that enable radiologists to keep their primary diagnostic tasks localized to one application, instead of the multiple apps they currently use.

The challenge of the project was to create a "ground-up" new suite of radiology software products for GE that would work compatibly with, and leverage the information from, a hospital's existing information infrastructure.

Considerations of a Radiologist's Work Environment

Multiple workstation configurations were designed at the beginning of the project to accomodate the many ways in which radiologists read exams and diagnose patients — because radiologists use up to 4 monitors to access clinical information, queue up their work, look at patients currently on the schedule in the Emergency Room and in inpatient exam rooms, view images, and dictate exams, it is critical for them to have their workstations set up in the most efficient way.

Because Workflow Manager was intended to be the primary "driver" of all of these radiology tasks and workflows, it was essential that it be configurable and responsive in many states, as well as visible in a darkened radiologist's "reading room" environment.

Design Iterations Based on Layering Clinical Features

Design iterations (2014 - 2016): The user interface grew, changed, and developed greatly over multiple internal releases from 2014 to 2016. We researched, designed, and added multiple features to improve the radiologist's workflow, including communication and collaboration tools, the ability to create customized exam lists, the ability to sort, filter and search patients and their images, the ability to assign work to other doctors, the ability to read multiple exams simultaneously, and the introduction of clinical content from electronic medical records into the user interface. The designs below represent many iterations of the product based on the inclusion of new features over time:

Timeline: Evolution of a Complex Clinical Application

Screenshots of the Workflow Manager application in the development environment after the first internal release (left), and in it's state as of Fall 2015's internal release.

Project Outcomes

As af 2017, GE's Radiology Desktop suite has been released across multiple hospitals, including UPMC, NY Presbyterian, and University of Washington Medical Center, among others. My team's work on the interface designs for this software suite have been patented by GE.