A patient safety invention born from research at Columbia University Medical Center — now standard of care, protecting young women for over a decade.
Who We Worked With
Columbia University Children's Hospital of New York
Partners
Frankie Day-Lyon
Services
Research & Strategy, Product & Experience
Project Fun Fact
>90% efficacy
Three departments. Conflicting needs. One invention still protecting patients a decade later.
Female scoliosis patients at Children’s Hospital of New York weren’t receiving gonadal shielding during their X-rays. These were mostly young teens, scanned every 3-6 months — and nobody had solved the problem because three departments needed three different things that seemed incompatible.
Orthopedics needed clear views of the full spine and pelvis. Radiology needed shields they could place quickly and accurately on dozens of patients a day. Patient safety needed protection for ovaries that were being exposed to repeat radiation with no intervention. No existing shield could do all three.
I started in the X-ray archive. A systematic review of 100+ patient X-rays confirmed what the doctors suspected: ovarian shielding was either inconsistent or completely absent. Then I went to radiology and asked a question nobody had thought to ask the technicians directly: what landmarks do you actually use when placing shields?
They told me the iliac crest. That single insight from the people doing the work every day unlocked the whole design. I built a shield that anchored to that landmark, eliminating guesswork. It provided full ovarian protection without obstructing any spinal views — from both head-on and lateral angles. I hand-constructed it from X-ray shielding material, tested it with radiologists using prop-materials, then validated it with consenting patients.
The images came back perfect.
Within two weeks, the entire radiology team was trained and the shield was formally adopted as the new standard of care. I built two additional sizes for larger and smaller patients. When I visited two years later, the shields were still in daily use.
As of 2024 — a full decade later — the shields remain the standard of care at Children’s Hospital of New York. Thousands of young patients with ovaries have received radiation protection they otherwise would have lacked.
This is the project that taught me everything: go to the people doing the work, ask the question nobody’s asked, and design something so simple it outlasts you.
