PerformanceBridge Radiology Solutions

PerformanceBridge was a new kind of business for Philips: software and services that help radiology departments see and improve how their equipment performs. When I joined, I was the only designer, and many people wondered why design was in the room at all.

I started with a story. With the marketing team I created “Sarah,” a radiology director, and walked her through a year with her equipment. Sarah grew into a service blueprint covering what she sees, what Philips does behind the scenes, and where the two meet. A persona of the hospital IT manager showed why the product had to serve IT, administrators and clinical staff at once.

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The blueprint changed expectations quickly. Leadership asked for screens, and I secured funding for a team. We sketched flows in watercolor, co-designed dashboards with customers, and worked out how utilization data could turn into staff training plans.

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Then in 2017, RSNA, radiology's biggest annual show, asked for a demonstrator. The team built the key scenarios as a working prototype and finished two days before the show. Customer validation there and afterwards shaped the specifications we handed to engineering.

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Radiology departments run scanners from all the major brands (GE, Siemens and Philips) across CT, MR, interventional X-ray and ultrasound. Each system kept its own data in its own format, so no one could see the department as a whole. That gap was the biggest barrier to managing performance.

We pulled data from every brand and combined it into one set of dashboards: utilization, volume, study time and turnover, each measured against the hospital's own targets. That meant aligning with DICOM and HL7, the two international standards for medical imaging and healthcare data. It was a tall order, and the hardest problem was taxonomy: the same exam, event or measure had different names in different systems. We had to resolve that before any number could be trusted.

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Then we looked for consistency. In field research at several hospitals, we found that common CT protocols (head, neck, chest, abdomen) were run differently from hospital to hospital, and often between locations of the same health system. That sometimes meant longer scans or missing data. The effects reached patients, clinicians, and costs in billing and insurance.

Our solution normalized protocols, highlighted the differences, and let administrators set consistent standards across the fleet, while clinicians kept control at the point of the procedure. Control with consistency: a fundamental UX principle, applied at the scale of a health system.

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The same data fed training. A report creator turned utilization patterns into targeted training plans for technologists.

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For a biomedical engineer responsible for thousands of devices, a broken scanner means a phone call, a wait, and a patient schedule on hold. Service data kept pointing to the same pain: slow, opaque troubleshooting and heavy paperwork for Philips field engineers.

I asked the team to imagine what it could be like. We role-played the scenario with customers, then built a video and a working software prototype of a customer service portal.

The centerpiece was a single case screen. It shows what happened, the engineer's diagnosis in plain language, and what happens next. It offers self-help before “Request support,” and shows how much of the service contract the case used. A black-box repair became a shared conversation between the hospital and Philips.

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When a key stakeholder saw it, the response was: “That's it! I get it now.” The concept started an internal effort to digitize Philips' customer service infrastructure, and the portal shipped together with the performance dashboards as one platform.