As we continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, cancer does not stop, and any delay in diagnosis and treatment in oncology care can pose a high risk to patients.
Rapid adoption of digital pathology services has been critical to ensure continuity of diagnostic services during the pandemic, enabling pathologists to conduct primary diagnosis from home as well as protect themselves and those around them.
During the pandemic, the Department of Pathology experienced a significant transformation on a scale never before seen in the field. The acquisition, management, sharing and interpretation of pathology information in a digital environment has ‘come of age’ over the past two years, with research from Signify indicating that the market will have a 40.9% year-on-year market share in 2020. increase was observed.
Health providers and CMIOs are increasingly focusing on pathology within their broader digitalization strategies, enabling fully digital care solutions to expedite the process of viewing slides to aid decision making. While challenges lie ahead, the power of virtualization and the ability to connect with other teams, along with advances in AI, mean that digital pathology is the key to a new paradigm of diagnostic accuracy.
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The power of virtualization and care orchestration
One of the main challenges facing pathology departments is the increasing shortage of pathologists. In addition, pathologists are spread across multiple locations trying to be sub-specialists to provide the right expertise for difficult cases. This creates a complex workflow, where slides must be optimally distributed to pathologists throughout the system, balancing workloads but targeting the right specialists to the right cases. Complicated cases, once acquired digitally, pathology data is growing rapidly, kept in different systems and scattered across different departments. This lack of a fully integrated, interoperable and secure set of cohesive systems keeps data, practitioners and workflows silent and inefficient.
The virtual network enables pathology departments to mitigate the impact of increased caseloads resulting from the pandemic by enabling efficient diagnosis and facilitating quick transfer of complex cases for second opinion. Engagement with other teams also provides pathologists with the opportunity to collaborate with multiple professionals, helping to improve opportunities for knowledge transfer and learning.
Enterprise-wide digital pathology solutions are able to tackle this issue with technology designed to accommodate current histopathology needs for routine use in high-volume laboratories and integrated pathology networks. Through virtualization and improved care orchestration, cases can be sent anywhere within the network to be read, increased access to specialists, optimized workloads and performed by non-subspecialist pathologists. The rate of interpretation errors can be reduced.
Enabling AI in Pathology for Deeper Insights
Digital pathology also opens the door for artificial intelligence (AI) and automated tools for reading slides to help empower clinicians to deliver clear care pathways with predictable outcomes for every patient.
The key to a new model of diagnostic precision is bringing together multiple clinical insights within the healthcare continuum such as radiology, pathology and genomics along a patient’s journey to critical states. By providing interoperability and connectivity to pathologists to share high-quality images, use new technologies enabled by digitization (such as AI) and extend clinical insights across networks, they are the data-driven future of the future. become a major stakeholder in health systems.
AI-powered workflows have the potential to provide a continuous pathway where patient data critical to both pathologists and oncologists is made more rapidly visible, helping to improve the clinician experience and enhance patient care . This will be especially important in the coming years, as the industry balances workforce shortages with the growing demand for pathology services and the need to meet the ongoing impact of COVID-19.
