Digital Pathology Blog

Cut waste and increase the quality of your pathology service 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 your expert review? 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? 

When reviewing previous slides for your patient’s current case or when preparing for tumor boards, are you spending precious time and resources having your staff retrieve or recut slides? Do slides get lost or damaged causing more delays in your ability to expedite your case? Management of slide and block archives is a challenge for all anatomic pathology laboratories. How can implementing a robust digital pathology program help you make the best use of your time and resources? 

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. 


This article is the first in a two-part series to aide in the implementation of a digital pathology system. Using a systematic approach and standard project management principles, you can engage your team and keep your project on track. By working through the following steps, you will increase your chances of a successful system implementation within a reasonable timeframe defined by you and your project team.