Internal & External Pathology Reviews: Streamlining the Process

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? 

The pathology world is increasingly grounded in subspecialties. Smaller hospitals and pathology practices are turning to external subspecialty experts to provide the expertise required for more complex pathology cases. Utilization of these resources can add both time and unnecessary waste into the process unless properly managed.

Is unnecessary waste built into your process?

When you need the assistance of a subspeciality expert, you probably ask your support person to send the case to the subspecialist's office. It’s a simple request. But how much time does your staff actually spend pulling tissue blocks and slides, making recuts, copying reports and packaging everything for transport?

And how much time does their staff spend to unpack the material, line up the slides in a folder with the report, accession the case into their lab information system and deliver the material to the office? 

Once the case has been completed, the process must be reversed, and the clock continues to click while you wait for their results. In addition, your subspecialty expert must cover his or her support costs. You pay more for the service, and ultimately, those costs are passed on as part of the patient's comprehensive assessment.

How can you improve the timeliness and quality of your pathology service while reducing overall costs?

Corista’s Digital Pahtology Processing Platform (DP3) provides an effective solution to eliminate both the time and waste related to subspecialty expert reviews.

This digital pathology platform creates a “hub and spoke” network between the expert center (the hub) and referring organizations (the spokes).

When working on a difficult case and you would like to collaborate with a subspeciality expert, your staff can scan your glass slides producing whole slide images. (You don’t need to buy special hardware. The Corista platform works with all whole slide image scanners.) The case is accessioned into the DP3 system and - with the images attached – is now available for review at the hub. The triage administrator in the specialist’s practice reviews the images to ensure they are of appropriate quality and assigns the case to the appropriate subspecialist. The case is then immediately available for review by the appropriate pathologist at the hub.

If the hub pathologist wants to review the case with a referring pathologist, the system provides both synchronous and asynchronous image viewing with real-time messaging. When the case is complete, the report is immediately available to the referring pathologist.

With this process, there is no waiting for packaging or couriers. What used to take as much as two weeks can now be completed in as little as one hour. Waste, delays and cost are removed from the process, reducing anxious moments waiting for an answer. The combination of the right technology and the right expertise allow you to provide the highest quality service your pathology department can offer.

Anxious moments waiting for an answer are reduced, and any necessary treatment can begin. The combination of the right technology and the right expertise means getting the right doctor on the right case for the right patient at the right time.   

For more information about the Corista DP3^TM System, read Frost & Sullivan’s report announcing their award of the Digital Pathology Product Innovation Award for 2014.