LABORATORY MANAGEMENT
Improving laboratory efficiency: the hidden costs of manual slide handling
While the move to digital pathology requires a large up-front investment; what is often not considered are the ongoing hidden costs associated with traditional glass-slide workflows. Ryan Davis examines the specific laboratory efficiency workflow costs that manual slide handling imposes, and explains why addressing these costs is not just capital expenditure argument.
The direct costs of a glass-slide workflow are easy to see on a budget line. The indirect costs; the full-time employee (FTE) hours absorbed by retrieval, assembly, transport, and misfiling; the turnaround time (TAT) hours lost to physical logistics; the staff time spent on avoidable rework – are harder to see, yet they can have a substantial impact on laboratory efficiency, productivity, and costs. There is a specific pressure that every
laboratory manager understands from the inside but struggles to quantify from the outside. Pathology request volumes are rising, estimated at 5-10% annually, driven by ageing populations, expanding screening programmes, and the growing complexity of precision oncology workups.1
Simultaneously, the laboratory
workforce faces chronic understaffing: more histotechnologists and pathology staff are retiring than entering the field, and recruitment has become a persistent operational challenge in laboratories of every size.2
The result is a gap between
what the laboratory needs to produce and the human resources available to produce it.
Most laboratory managers are managing this gap through informal means: longer shifts, deferred leave, informal cross-training, and the quiet absorption of excess workload by experienced staff who cannot sustain it indefinitely. What most have not yet done is a rigorous audit of where their current workflow is consuming time and staff capacity that a different infrastructure
could recapture. The glass-slide workflow is the largest single reservoir of hidden inefficiency in the anatomic pathology laboratory, and it is largely invisible to the managers closest to it.
This article names and quantifies the
specific laboratory efficiency workflow costs that manual slide handling imposes, draws on published operational data to show where the time goes, and makes the case for why addressing these costs is not a capital expenditure argument, it is a workforce sustainability argument.
A published time and motion analysis showed that digital pathology implementation saved 43 minutes per day of a pathologist’s time, 13.4% of the workday, through automation of case assembly, queries, requests, retrieval, and delivery.3
The anatomy of a manual slide workflow
A glass slide does not simply travel from the histopathology bench to the pathologist’s microscope. Between preparation and sign-out, it passes through multiple handling events: physical sorting and assembly into cases, batching for delivery or retrieval, transport between departments or sites, filing in the slide library archive, and later, retrieval for comparison cases, tumour boards, ancillary testing, or external consultation.
September 2026
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