#379 - 💡Rethinking Phototherapy – Engineering Innovation with Steve Falk of GE Healthcare

Hello friends 👋

In the final episode of our Rethinking Phototherapy series, Ben speaks with Steve Falk, Chief Engineer of the Maternal Infant Care Strategic Business Unit at GE Healthcare. With more than three decades of engineering leadership, Steve has been instrumental in the development of landmark neonatal technologies, including the Giraffe Omnibed and Panda platforms.

This conversation highlights the critical role of engineering in making phototherapy precise, reliable, and safe. Steve explains how advances in LED technology have transformed phototherapy devices, ensuring consistent irradiance and long product life. He describes how engineers translate clinical needs—wavelength, intensity, surface coverage, and distance—into product requirements, and how rigorous usability testing with clinicians shapes intuitive bedside tools. The discussion also explores innovation on the horizon, from refining intermittent phototherapy strategies to integrating technologies that simplify care and support earlier discharge.

Listeners will gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on how engineering teams think about phototherapy as a true pharmacotherapy, and how collaboration between clinicians and industry can directly improve outcomes for newborns and families. This episode closes the series by reminding us that innovation in neonatal care happens not only in clinical practice, but also in the design labs where these essential tools are created.

Link to episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/uTIOx6AAph4

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Short Bio: Steve Falk has over thirty-five years of product development and technical leadership experience in industry, both in a start-up environment and a large corporation. He is currently the Chief Engineer for the Maternal Infant Care strategic business unit in GE HealthCare. He has been with this business for more than 31 years in a variety of roles and responsibilities, including Senior Engineer, Engineering Manager, Lead Program Engineer, Engineering Director, CTO, and Chief Engineer. Steve has been integrally involved with all phases of product development, including voice of customer, business development, business model generation, design, verification, validation, and production transfer. He also serves as the Patent Evaluation Board leader. Steve is honored to have led the Giraffe OmniBed and Giraffe/Panda platform product development efforts – a game-changing product solution for the perinatal care setting.

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The transcript of today's episode can be found below 👇

Ben Courchia (00:00.856)

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Incubator Podcast. We are back today for an episode of Tech Tuesday. And I am joined by a podcast veteran, Steve Falk from GE Healthcare. Steven, good morning. How are you today?

Steve Falk (00:13.39)

Ben, thank you.

Ben Courchia (00:15.278)

You came on the podcast about a year or so ago when we talked about thermal regulation. I think that people really enjoyed getting an inside look at how engineers think about some of the tools that are being given to them at the bedside. For people who don't remember, you are the chief engineer for the Maternal Infant Care Strategic Business Unit at GE Healthcare. You've been with GE for over three decades in a variety of engineering leadership roles. You've led landmark projects like the Giraffe Omnibed, which we all use, and the Giraffe Panda platforms. Over the course of your career, you've been deeply involved in every stage of product development. So you also chair the Patent Evaluation Board at GE and it's a pleasure to welcome you back on the podcast to talk a little bit about phototherapy.

Steve Falk (01:04.952)

Great, thank you. It's great being here.

Ben Courchia (01:06.83)

We've had several episodes and discussions with physicians who came to talk to us a little bit about hyperbilirubinemia, about phototherapy. And in those earlier episodes, they've emphasized really one point each and every single time. And that was that phototherapy should not really be seen as simply just flipping a light switch, but rather really as a pharmacotherapy with dosing, duration, precision. So I'm wondering as an engineer, do you and your team approach phototherapy devices with that same mindset?

Steve Falk (01:42.914)

Yeah, we do. So great question. Phototherapy science, if you will, the products have evolved. People probably remember the fluorescent and then there was the incandescent lights and now we use LED lights. And a lot of that evolution is for both accuracy of light as well as low degradation. So what I mean by that is the fluorescent, the incandescent would over the life of the bulb decrease and the LED lights actually stay pretty stable until they go end of life. So we're constantly looking at the science and the technology to fulfill the needs, yes.

Ben Courchia (02:26.572)

It's interesting. We've had people on the podcast of various seniority, as I would say. I think that it was Dr. Fanaroff who's been in this field since neonatology began. And he was mentioning how in his young residency days or something, he had to periodically go and change the bulbs on the phototherapy lights periodically during the night. And so I think that it's a testament to the evolution you're describing where we're really not doing things the way we used to and that's kind of, I guess, for the best.

Steve Falk (02:57.528)

Yes.

Ben Courchia (02:59.15)

In terms of phototherapy specifically, I think that one of the items that we've also discussed is that it really depends on a lot of different factors, on the irradiance, on the distance from the baby, on the duration. How do you translate these clinical constraints into engineering requirements?

Steve Falk (03:19.116)

Yeah. So, dosage for phototherapy, and I'm sure you've talked about it in previous podcasts, is think about it as light intensity, assuming a particular wavelength, light intensity, as well as surface area, body surface area. So when we think about it as requirements into engineering, we think about, so for instance, overhead phototherapy, how much of the baby can we cover to get that body surface area measurement.

And then it becomes the intensity. You know, LED lights really are relatively recent evolution because the LEDs now can have the intensity to get back, you know, up to 30 microwatts per square centimeter, per nanometer. They never used to. So we think about the intensity when you talked about the distance of the bed, that really is an intensity measure as well as a surface area measure. So when you look at a spot phototherapy overhead, the further away you get, yes, you get maybe a little more body coverage, but you get much less intensity. The light actually attenuates, I don't know if anybody knows this, proportional to the distance squared. So as you go up a couple centimeters, you're really killing the intensity. And so understanding that, honestly, the ultimate kind of measure in the clinical world is to actually use a bilirubinometer or some type of photometer to measure the intensity that the baby's getting and work to change the distance based on that intensity. But that's how we think about it. So when you think about fiber optic phototherapy, for instance, it's not really a distance thing because the baby is next to the fiber optic. So it's really about the intensity that we can really push through all those fibers and have that blanket glow and give the baby the right intensity.

Ben Courchia (05:11.19)

Yeah, that's actually quite interesting. And just to go back to one of the things you just mentioned, which is that the intensity of the phototherapy is related to the square of the distance from the baby to the light source, which means that if I understand correctly, by moving the light further and further away, you're exponentially losing the irradiance of the light. Wow, that's incredible.

Steve Falk (05:36.312)

Correct.

Ben Courchia (05:40.172)

To that point then, how do you guys ensure basically that for phototherapy specifically, it seems that the MO is consistency and reliability. So how do you say, how do we create something that people are going to be able to use at the bedside and is going to deliver what needs to be delivered both consistently and reliably?

Steve Falk (06:06.06)

Yeah, so, you know, as engineers, we're going to first think of it as a system level and then we'll get down to components. So as a system level, absolutely, we need not only reliability, but just the ability to be predictable, that the unit will always work and it will always work at a particular intensity and it will always work as expected by the clinician. So whether that's overhead phototherapy, whether that's fiber optics. So part of it is the fact that we went to LEDs, they're much more predictable light. They're much longer light. I mean, the LEDs can last thousands and thousands of hours. I remember your original, the story you opened with about the change in the fluorescent light during the night, you know, even incandescence would be, you know, a few hundred hours, maybe you get 500 hours, now we're at thousands of hours. And that light is relatively predictable, which is great. I think then you start thinking about, so for instance, take the fiber optic phototherapy. You have an LED light and then you have a lensing system to ensure that that light is all captured into the fibers at a certain angle so that the fibers get the most light they can. We actually have measurements of sort of throughput of light. It's like, you know, you always think data throughput. It's actually throughput of photons into the fibers and how they are able to pop out of the blanket, if you will, to the baby and how predictable that is. So we actually have requirements and specifications for each section of the phototherapy unit. We have one for the light source. We have one for the coupling into the fiber, we have one for the fiber, and we have one at the end of coming out of the panel. So we really are trying to understand all the different interactions of these components to be able to predict what the system is gonna do.

Ben Courchia (07:50.954)

It's interesting because it seems like such a rigorous process. And yet clinicians and nurses and providers, they want something at the bedside that's simple to use. So how do you guys then balance this very rigorous requirement sheet with user friendliness, all the while keeping the precision that you just mentioned to deliver effective therapy?

Steve Falk (08:14.082)

That is the actual magic sauce, right? So first of all, we're doing all those requirements so that we can be very predictable. To be honest, to think about what the user expectations and how they use it, the first thing you have to have is predictability. Otherwise, everything's kind of off the table. We also take usability, human factors, there's various terms for it, but the idea of how intuitive products are to use. We prioritize it extremely highly. We have human factors teams from GE that work with us to actually have usability testing, have focus groups, have these focus groups use prototypes with us and continue to work with us to make sure that we're doing things right. We can solve things by making things complex but easy to use or simplifying things to make it easy to use. And you're constantly balancing that and trying to make the right call. But to say that usability testing is a huge component of our product development, it's really in just about every phase, but most especially towards the end where we really finalize all the design intents.

Ben Courchia (09:44.974)

That's really neat. I wanted to ask you, since you're mentioning this human factor team, and I like this concept that I think that most people don't think about engineering as an interplay with end users. And I was wondering, do you guys welcome feedback from clinicians? Let's say somebody who is using this tomorrow and says, "Hey, I would love to just like relay one thing that I found." Is that something that is welcomed by the engineering team or once the product is shipped, that's it?

Steve Falk (10:14.504)

We welcome feedback all the time. We continuously have our ears and eyes open from inception to post-launch and working in the care area. As a matter of fact, products evolve through product development significantly due to the fantastic feedback we receive. We love feedback from everyone, from conferences, conversations, emails, focus groups, usability testing, NICU visits, and more. We also have amazing clinical and medical teams that bring feedback and guidance to the table, but also help translate the clinical setting and clinical needs to the engineering teams.

Ben Courchia (10:41.198)

That's really neat. Maybe that could be one of the outcomes of this particular episode to create that. If as a listener you've always wanted to reach out, maybe that's the opportunity. One of the things that we've talked about also is that there's this misconception that phototherapy, hyperbilirubinemia, feels like a matured sort of pathology in neonatology. It feels like, it's been around forever. It's affected so many people and we feel like, okay, we figured this out. But the truth of the matter is that we haven't.

Steve Falk (10:51.384)

For sure.

Ben Courchia (11:09.958)

And I'm wondering from your standpoint, not really from a pathophysiologic standpoint necessarily, but as an engineer looking ahead, what do you guys see in terms of gaps in the current phototherapy technology? Where do you think the innovation is going to drive you next? And what do you see potentially as areas that will be fun to explore for you guys?

Steve Falk (11:29.878)

Yeah, great question. So we talk about that all the time. And I can only give away what I can publicly give away here. But yeah, I get that. I get that. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I think we're constantly not only talking to people, but we're looking at the research. So you see research on maybe there's some wavelength changes that get a little more efficiency.

Ben Courchia (11:38.272)

I purposefully remained very vague, so you can be as specific as you'd like to be.

Steve Falk (11:57.113)

We're looking at various things with respect to, I was actually very surprised to read a tremendous amount of literature that suggests that intermittent phototherapy is as effective as continuous phototherapy. And being engineers, you know, we're always curious about the why behind that. And to understand that molecular photochemistry that says, hey, there's this photo-isomerization that's happening at the skin level, but then there's this sort of slower reaction that goes on between how the lumirubin gets back to the main bloodstream and how the bilirubin in the main bloodstream gets to the skin. And so, excuse me, so the concept of being able to put a couple hours of phototherapy and maybe a half an hour off is a tremendous kind of insight. And so how do we wanna think about that and folding that into phototherapy to help the clinician that way? And so we're constantly looking at what can we do to make phototherapy not only simpler and simpler to use, but more effective. Because the ultimate goal is getting these kids healthy and getting them discharged, especially if that's the only thing that they're in the hospital for, sooner.

Ben Courchia (13:08.718)

Yeah, I mean, that's a great segue for reaching the end of our time. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the human connection and motivation. I feel like when we speak to people like you who are working for industry partners, it's important to understand that we all have sort of the same goal, which is to help a patient, a baby in need. And at the heart of this work, obviously, is vulnerable newborns and their families. I'm wondering why does this work matter to you personally, Steven, and to the team at GE? And are there any moments where you felt specifically, like especially connected to the impact of your work on babies and families?

Steve Falk (13:49.645)

Yeah, no, we talk about that a lot. I think people will find that the Strategic Business Unit of Maternal Infant Care within GE Healthcare specifically has this amazing mission that everybody, how do you not follow this mission with your heart? And so, you'll find that it's a very kind of almost emotionally driven place in such a cool way. I think that, look, the reason I get up in the morning and come to work is exactly that, is we're helping babies and families and isn't that the ultimate goal here? One sort of example of what just, you know, I tell the team that has always sort of floored me and it's not really a phototherapy story, but in general, a couple of years after we launched the Giraffe Omnibed, I got a call from a father and I don't even know how he got my number. It was from New Jersey and this father says, "I'm rounding the corner and my son who I can't remember the gestational age, but very premature baby was in a Giraffe Omnibed that was a demo unit. And he had to come out because the demo was scheduled to leave. And he overheard a couple of nurses say something to the effect of, 'We can't take this kid out of the Omnibed. He's going to go south.'" And he somehow found my number. He called me up and offered me the sales price from his checking account to keep that product in the unit.

Ben Courchia (14:49.496)

Yeah.

Ben Courchia (14:57.036)

Wow.

Ben Courchia (15:13.345)

Wow.

Steve Falk (15:14.646)

And so obviously we kept the product in the unit. It just in general, makes you really understand how close to not only the patient, but the family and just in general humans, what we do is. How do you not get turned on by that? So yeah.

Ben Courchia (15:32.704)

I agree. That's a very motivating story. My last question, since you're mentioning the Omnibed, it feels like, especially at GE, you guys have a little bit of your hand in a lot of different parts in various things that are being done for neonates in the NICU. You mentioned the Omnibed, and we mentioned the Giraffe, and so on and so forth. But it seems like you guys have a deliberate intention to integrate various solutions that you're coming up with with one another. And I'm wondering how much do you think you guys are going to be able to continue along this path? And does this present challenges that you think at some point may not be solvable, where we cannot put everything on the bed? It will have to be different units, or it will increase complexity.

Steve Falk (16:18.296)

Well, there's always going to be that. Systemically, we'd love to integrate a bunch of things in there. The key then is, and this is always an interesting debate is, what do you integrate and what should you keep separate from various points of view? One is, what is the clinician expecting and what do they need to do? Where do they need to see what kind of information? And there may be good reasons why not to integrate something. There may be great reasons to integrate something. Same thing as you think. You know, do you integrate and then what happens if you have some sort of product failure in some way, something breaks and then do you take down that sort of, does that take down all the other things you've integrated? But you can't take that to the ultimate extreme and everything is separate. And then you've got 15 things sitting around the baby. So what is that true balance point? And that's a tough thing to balance. And we work on that a lot. Yeah.

Ben Courchia (17:08.046)

Steven, thank you so much for sharing your perspective. I always enjoy talking to you because as doctors, we feel like we think a lot about phototherapy and some of these things. But it's cool to see that you guys as engineers think just as much about it as we do. And I think every bit is as critical as the clinical side. So I think the intersection of our jobs is very neat. Thank you again for the time and for sharing your perspective.

Steve Falk (17:21.74)

Yes.

Steve Falk (17:34.543)

Thank you for having me. I love talking to you too. Thank you.

Ben Courchia (17:36.888)

Likewise.