DIGITAL PATHOLOGY
Digital pathology: ensuring a return on investment
Implementing a digital pathology workflow comes at a considerable cost; and measuring the return on investment is a difficult and multi-faceted task. Here, the pathology team at Vestfold Hospital Trust in Norway share their experience of going digital and evaluating the benefits.
For years, Pål Suhrke dreamed of implementing a fully digital pathology laboratory at his hospital. “The first time we tried to get some funding for buying a scanner, that was almost 10 years ago,” Suhrke said. They got the money; but then, they paused. “It’s pretty easy to buy a scanner, but what is perhaps more important is how to implement it in the workflow,” Suhrke said. “And that was the tricky thing.”
In 2019, after years of planning and consideration, the digitisation stars finally aligned: Suhrke’s hospital, Vestfold Hospital Trust in Norway, had a VNA (vendor-neutral archive) in place and had just launched a new LIS. Suhrke reached out to Vestfold’s hospital network and got permission for his laboratory to serve as a regional digitisation pilot site. The digital laboratory project, launched in 2022, is already seeing significant benefits from
going digital; enough in fact that other hospitals in the network have started following suit.
As other nearby laboratories emulate
Vestfold’s pilot digital transformation efforts, it is possible to learn from its experiences and begin to evaluate the overall return on investment (ROI) for digitisation in pathology laboratories.
Understanding ROI To understand ROI, an important first step is to quantify the near-term costs and benefits. A recently published online ROI calculator1
from the Digital Pathology The pathology team at work in Vestfold Hospital Trust in Norway.
WWW.PATHOLOGYINPRACTICE.COM FEBRUARY 2025
Association suggests eight categories of costs to consider, along with eleven areas for savings and four potential new revenue streams, each of which will vary widely by hospital. To get the full picture, it is also important to consider longer- term outcomes, like talent management and integration of artificial intelligence. At first, many laboratories find that the costs of digitisation are more apparent relative to the benefits. After all, for many years, the status quo – microscopic review of glass slides – has worked just fine. This consideration was part of Suhrke’s initial calculation. “As a pathologist, of course, the most important thing is to review cases. And for that, the microscope works just fine,” Suhrke said. But he also weighed the opportunity costs of the status quo against the benefits of digitisation and the new capabilities it offered. Clearly, change does come with costs: transforming a laboratory requires capital-intensive expenditures for digital scanners, high-definition monitors for digital image review, cloud storage for those images, and the IT support to integrate and maintain systems. Change management is also a temporary cost, albeit a less visible one.
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