Cut Waste and Increase Quality of Care with New Technology
I’m sure you’ve thought about it. Every time a package arrives at your pathology practice, it represents a patient anxiously waiting for results at the other end.
What would happen if you could significantly reduce the time it takes to return an opinion? How would your practice benefit if you could reduce the costs involved?
Tumor boards were created with worthy objectives in mind – to share knowledge, improve current patient care, and prepare/educate residents & fellows for their future practices. Tumor boards are also a requirement for cancer center accreditation, hence a necessary cost of doing business.
Preparing for tumor boards, however, is too often an onerous task fraught with time delays, rework, and cumbersome, inflexible presentation methods. After your support staff pulls reports, retrieves slides, and brings them to you, do you spend hours photographing and taking notes of the key points you then load into a PowerPoint to present for each case? Do you ever get to your tumor boards and find that another view of the slide might better answer the clinician’s question?
In a previous blog post, we shared key steps to a successful digital pathology system implementation. This is the second article of a two-part series designed to assist you in managing the whole process.
A successful digital pathology system implementation depends upon careful planning and commitment. Most pathologists are hesitant to move from the gold standard of glass slides to a digital image-based platform. Today, however, whole-slide scanners can provide high quality images that allow pathologists increased flexibility for case management and collaboration with other pathologists. As the technology continues to grow, digital pathology will soon become the new gold standard.
Pathologists frequently mention “I consulted on this” or “I sent this case off to a consultant” or “We were consulted about…”. But what does it mean? It is frequently puzzling for clinicians or patients. Does that mean my tissue specimen went to another laboratory? Does that mean slides or images from my case were seen outside the institution? Who gets consulted? Who pays for this?
In medical school, the pathologists would come to lecture during second year, and while they had their own subspecialty or research interests, they would often tell us “Pathology is a lot of fun. All of the interesting cases in the hospital wind up under the microscope and you are respected among your peers.”
