Why Digital Pathology Platform Adoption Will Fail Without Interoperability?

Even before digital pathology became the obvious solution for coping with social distancing, it was delivering meaningful benefits to a growing roster of leading laboratories; organizations that embrace the technology are seeing between 13 and 21% quality and efficiency gains. Realizing these benefits, and enabling remote operations, starts with a core platform for viewing, managing, sharing, and analyzing images and associated pathology data. This platform sits at the heart of the laboratory’s practice and is surrounded by an increasingly complex ecosystem of hardware and software solutions that each plays a key role in the pathologist’s workflow. As evidenced by a growing number of studies, AI-enabled digital pathology is already driving added quality and efficiency gains, benefits that are just scratching the surface when it comes to its long-term potential. It, too, must be integrated into the digital pathology ecosystem, which centers around the core platform. Now, we see that the impact of centralizing pathology operations around an interoperable platform extends beyond overcoming siloed data. When it comes to enabling the pathologist to make a diagnosis, unifying all the necessary pathology solutions and their associated data is just the first step. Bringing all this data together – by connecting the core digital pathology platform with other sources – to achieve integrated diagnostics not only better informs pathology findings but also advances the quest for personalized medicine. And just as AI is increasingly delivering new sources of value in pathology, similar algorithms can be applied to a broader set of diagnostic information to unlock new insights that further shape how we diagnose and treat each individual patient. Similar to how EHR systems have become a standard component of the modern healthcare practice, delivering meaningful benefits for patients and providers alike, interoperable digital pathology platforms are increasingly advancing the standard of care.