“I need to constantly do more with less while maintaining the highest possible quality.” The answer to that constraint is not asking existing staff to absorb more workload; it is eliminating the workload that does not need to exist. Manual slide logistics is workload that does not need to exist.
The multidisciplinary meeting problem One of the most concrete and underappreciated sources of manual workflow cost is the multidisciplinary team (MDT) meeting. In a glass-slide workflow, MDT preparation requires physical assembly and transport of comparison slides, coordination between pathology and clinical teams for case scheduling, and the sequential presentation of one case at a time as slides are physically managed on a microscope or projector. Published data indicate that digital MDTs allow substantially more cases to be reviewed in equivalent meeting time, because there is no physical slide management overhead.6 The operational significance for a
laboratory manager is direct: every MDT that currently requires 90 minutes of pathology staff time for case preparation could require substantially less with a digital workflow. At an institution with multiple weekly MDTs across oncology subspecialties, this translates to measurable hours per week of senior staff time recovered for diagnostic work rather than logistics. A digital pathology cost analysis
carried out at Memorial Sloan Ketering Cancer Center projected $267,000/year
LABORATORY MANAGEMENT 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
in savings from personnel restructuring, decreased vendor services, and storage cost reduction. Over a projected five-year period, the total savings estimate was $1.3 million. These are not projected gains from improved diagnostic outcomes. They are direct operational cost eliminations from the manual slide workflow.3
Where infrastructure choice matters Laboratory managers evaluating digital pathology infrastructure need to understand that not all scanners impose the same operational burden. A scanner with a high rescan rate – meaning a significant proportion of slides require repeat scanning due to image quality failures – creates a new source of manual workflow overhead. Slides must be flagged, retrieved, and rescanned, with staff monitoring required. Published comparative data on FDA-cleared platforms show that rescan rates vary substantially across available systems.7 The Epredia E1000 Dx Digital Pathology
Solution demonstrated the lowest rescan rate of all six currently FDA-
cleared WSI platforms in the Kuhlman et al. comparative analysis.7
It is also
the first FDA-cleared system with an automated focal map rescan that triggers automatically when an out-of-focus image is detected, without requiring manual staff intervention. For a manager focused on minimising touchpoints and staff overhead, this capability directly supports the throughput case.8
A scanner with high
throughput and low staff-intervention rescan requirements needs a smaller scan team and creates a cleaner workflow than one that introduces a new manual quality-management overhead. A related and often-overlooked source of hidden staff overhead is the need to monitor the scanner continuously for problem slides, including slides at risk of damage, jamming, or causing an instrument fault. In a conventional workflow, these events stop the scanning run and require immediate staff intervention before continuous operation can resume. The E1000 Dx addresses this through a safety container architecture. When the scanner detects that continued processing could damage the slide or
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