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Tim Wojcik Brings 'Consistency of Purpose' to DRX-1 Wireless DR Detector
Carestream Health is first-to-market with a cassette-sized, wireless digital radiography (DR) detector thanks to the engineering lead's ability to negotiate tough design tradeoffs
Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor -- Design News, July 30, 2009
Practical. Encouraging. A constant voice of reason. Not quite the adjectives you'd expect to describe the engineering lead on a ground-breaking new medical device project. But for the Carestream Health Inc. team, which developed the first cassette-sized, wireless digital radiography (DR) detector, the steady, calming presence of Tim Wojcik, research program leader, was instrumental in navigating the unknown technical waters surrounding the DRX-1 project.
Wojcik's 30-plus years in engineering positions within the digital imaging space, including prominent positions on two prior, first-to-market digital imaging products, gave him the breadth of technical know-how and leadership experience necessary for Carestream Health to deliver on its aggressive design goals for the DRX-1, which became commercially available in June. Moreover, Wojcik's consistent style of leadership and engineering practicality kept the project in management's good graces during some pretty significant setbacks, while guiding the team through a series of design tradeoffs to ensure it was first-to-market with a category-changing product. For those reasons, Design News nominates Wojcik as one of our Engineer of the Year candidates for 2009.
"Tim was the guy that kept this project going," says Bill Wendlandt, Carestream Health's technical project manager for the DRX-1. "He was able to bridge the gap amongst all the disciplines-mechanical, electrical, imaging scientists and suppliers-and put the pieces together that made sense. Because of the breadth of his technical experience, he had the ability to see how those different pieces could be synchronized."
In Search of Disruptive Technology
What Wojcik and Carestream Health set out to orchestrate was no small task. For more than 30 years, the healthcare industry had been in transition from older projection X-ray technology to the higher performing digital radiography (DR), but the conversion was stalled. While DR offers improved diagnostic quality and productivity advances, health care organizations were slow to adopt the new technology because of the high cost of the equipment and the additional expense of converting existing facilities to accommodate the new, larger-size gear.
Carestream Health, formerly the Health Group of Eastman Kodak Corp., had been in the DR business for eight years, but was looking for a breakout way to differentiate itself from larger competitors in the market. Sold by Kodak in May 2007 to an affiliate of Onex Corp., Carestream Health had enjoyed success with its Computed Radiography (CR) products, which were less expensive than DR and easy to install since they plugged right into existing X-ray equipment. Yet CR wasn't the disruptive force to jumpstart the conversion due to productivity tradeoffs associated with having to read and erase each image from the CR plate. Portable DR technology, the other possibility, was not highly regarded in the field because the cabling that was required often got in the way of positioning and patient care.
As head of Carestream Health's research group, Wojcik viewed the gap as an opportunity to create a game-changing DR offering. In 2005, his group got together with key product line managers to hone in on concepts that might spawn a disruptive DR product and they zeroed in on the idea of creating a DR detector with the same kind of plug-and-play architecture that CR technology had with the existing X-ray world. Wojcik and a small R&D team quickly got to work on the concept, but over the next year, the emerging design was met with a lukewarm response by the sales team, which had concerns about integration and the go-to-market strategy behind such a completely different product. Undeterred and still convinced of the concept's breakthrough appeal, Wojcik and his team kept refining the wireless, cassette-sized DR detector design, while doing everything in their power to build enthusiasm and foster sponsorship among the business line groups and upper management. Under Wojcik's direction, the shunkworks R&D team continued its quest for nearly three years before the project eventually got the green light from management to be a top priority for commercialization.
"The big idea didn't click right away," says Paul Taillie, Carestream Health's commercialization business manager for the DRX-1. "Tim was the champion. Under the covers and in public with management, he kept the idea alive and wouldn't let them toss it aside based on the lukewarm reaction from the field."
The idea sounded simple enough: Create a portable and easy to operate DR unit, at an attractive price point, that would integrate into existing X-ray equipment, eliminating the need for costly room makeovers. Yet the simplicity of the concept masked a highly complex design. For one thing, the new DR detector had to be a fraction of the size of traditional DR units, which weigh in about 40 pounds. That meant in the 14 X 17-inch space of a traditional X-ray cassette, Wojcik's team had to pack in some serious horsepower, including a glass sensor panel, radio, scintillator, battery and power management electronics. The unit also had to have a highly durable design to protect the sensitive image sensor panel from the wear and tear of everyday use, not to mention, accommodate wireless capabilities that delivered flexibility for patient care, while upholding high-performance image quality without interference from other nearby hospital systems.
A Series of Tradeoffs
Wojcik admits his "consistency of purpose" helped the team negotiate the right tradeoffs for this ambitious design. "We never deviated from the goal of having a cassette-sized form factor and to make the product portable," he says. "Many said we should make the detector bigger to give us more design space or to skip the wireless. But our competitors had made these tradeoffs, and I knew we had to stick to our guns-if we followed them, we'd lose track of the whole point of being a defining product."
Wojcik's breadth of experience, specifically in imaging engineering, likely accounts for his ability to make those kind of tough calls. With a degree in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, Wojcik started out at Kodak as a manufacturing engineer and "swam upstream from there," he explains, taking roles in product development, commercial program management and eventually making the leap over to the labs and innovation side of R&D. Being part of the engineering team for two other ground-breaking projects, the first medical laser printer and the first clinical CR system, also helped prep Wojcik for his role on the DRX-1 project.
The wireless component presented the biggest test for Wojcik's self-described "consistency of purpose." While his research team and the commercialization engineering group spent a significant amount of time early on doing parallel development on core parts of the DRX-1 system, including the mechanical packaging and the electronics circuitry related to the image subsystem, it left the wireless component to later on in the process, figuring it was a turn-key part of the system. That decision ended up haunting Wojcik and his team. Interference problems with the radio were degrading imaging performance, and many on the business side and in engineering management wanted to release the DRX-1 as a portable, tethered unit, adding wireless in subsequent versions.
Taille describes a meeting where the wireless function was taken off the table and participants were actively discussing alternative plans. "A band of people were motivated to change the original plan and dump the wireless, and I was on the fence because at that point, things were pretty dismal," he recalls. "Tim stood up in that meeting and said he thought we were selling ourselves short if we didn't go for the full intent of the original product concept. The spirit he conveyed at that one particular meeting helped turn it around. People left the meeting, and wireless was still very much alive."
Wendlandt believes Wojcik was able to turn things around for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Wojcik wasn't bent on flexing technical muscle on every turn of the DRX-1. For example, he steered the team to make tradeoffs around performance, believing it was more important to have a plug-and-play DR detector that could integrate with the existing X-ray form factor rather than having a larger unit capable of higher image quality. Wojcik also benefited from years of experience and technical know-how along with a systems engineering focus that lent credence to his decisions.
"In a project as complicated as this one where you need to have people with expertise at the individual subsystem level, you don't always find that person that can put it all together, especially early on," Wendlandt says. "You take someone with the same management skills that Tim has and put them in the same position and they may not have been as successful. The cornerstone of his success was having the vision, keeping it in front of management and producing a product someone actually wants."
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Tim Wojcik Brings 'Consistency of Purpose' to DRX-1 Wireless DR Detector
