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One of the motivations providers have for increasingly looking to adopt enterprise imaging solutions is to bring disparate departments together. For some vendors, this requirement means venturing into departments that they previously had no exposure to. Sometimes these transitions are relatively straightforward, with departments already meeting the criteria necessary for a shift to enterprise imaging. In other cases, however, the challenge is far more substantive. In pathology, for example, the general lack of digitisation, the poorly defined return on investment, and the nascency of the technology means the integration challenges facing vendors are very significant. However, some vendors are finding ways to rise to the occasion, with the potential rewards providing significant motivation.
The Signify View
Interest in digital pathology has been steadily increasing over the last decade. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, have wholeheartedly embraced the technology, while others, such as the US have been far more hesitant in their rollout. What many of these countries needed was a catalyst to hasten adoption.
Such a prompt came in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which highlighted the disparity in digitalisation between digital pathology and other departments. Many radiologists in mature markets, for instance, were able to work at home almost immediately thanks to the near complete digitisation of their field. Pathologists, meanwhile, had to continue to travel to hospitals, despite restrictions and the spread of Covid. This gave impetus to plans to digitise pathology labs and finally tackle the challenges that had been holding back the market’s progress.
These challenges are not insignificant. Digital pathology’s lack of standardisation makes it difficult for providers to invest heavily in both hardware and software, for fear that their investments will become obsolete as standards change or that they would not be able to take advantage of improved products from other vendors. Another hurdle is the size of the images produced, with files of 2 GB – 15 GB depending on the magnification, far higher than radiology images, which range between 0.02 GB and 0.05 GB for an X-ray, to 0.5 GB – 3 GB for a CT scan, for example. Whether stored in on-site servers, or in private or public clouds, this represents a significant cost that must be shouldered.
Return to Basics
A more fundamental challenge, however, lies in demonstrating the return on investment. When a hospital shifted X-ray imaging to digital radiology, it was able to demonstrate a clear cost saving given the X-ray film processing consumables were no longer needed. This is not the case in pathology, where providers will continue to face the costs of producing a slide as before, but, in addition, will also face the cost of expensive hardware, expensive software and image storage and transfer.
Digital pathology does offer opportunities for cost savings, but these are often poorly defined. For example, downstream care pathways benefit from ready access to images for clinical review (tumour board setting), while secondary consult and peer review is more flexible and efficient with digitalisation. Furthermore, the need for transport of glass slides is reduced and with flexible digital storage models, long-term archiving of glass slides can be reduced or made redundant. However, many of these benefits are hard to measure within conventional working practices, leading to tentative adoption.
Perhaps the greatest saving with digitalisation relates to many healthcare providers’ most prized and increasingly rare assets – its pathologists. Pathologists are in short supply, and digital workflow software and new AI tools which can automate time-consuming tasks, allowing these doctors to attend to cases more efficiently, offer a clear return on investment. However, in the case of AI, digital nascency has hindered development, such is the limited availability of training data. It will therefore be a long time before these AI-driven resources returns can be seen.
There are some positive advancements being made with regards to digital adoption however. Among the most significant is the recent provision of Class III CPT codes from the American Medical Association, which go into effect from January 2023. While these codes do not grant reimbursement for the use of digital pathology, they do allow additional work and service requirements associated with digitising glass slides to be tracked, representing a likely precursor to reimbursement.
Enterprise Opportunity
As such advancements facilitate and accelerate the uptake of digital pathology solutions, the opportunity for enterprise imaging vendors to capitalise also increases. For several significant lab equipment and consumables vendors offering digital pathology solutions, software, and even in some cases scanner hardware, was not a priority. Instead, it was merely a complementary business to their strong consumable products. Unlike the companies which are encumbered by this legacy, enterprise imaging vendors are free to be more disruptive within digital pathology. As healthcare providers are looking for more holistic imaging solutions, and decisions are increasingly being made at a higher level within a hospital, at a c-suite rather than departmental level, enterprise imaging vendors have the opportunity sell cross-department solutions. Offering a solution which includes significant digital pathology capability will appeal to a provider’s c-suite, helping them realise their ambitions of digitalising their pathology departments and enabling pathology to be used more closely alongside other types of medical imaging.
Different vendors are ensuring they can offer this capability in different ways – some such as Philips and Sectra offer digital pathology solutions in-house. This is a strategy which can offer advantages in the long-term, as these vendors can keep all revenues from digital pathology deals, while also having meticulous control over strategic direction and product development. This, however, comes at a cost. Significant time and investment is required to develop competitive solutions, which may still appear too late to trouble more established competition. What’s more, developing a solution in-house can also lack flexibility. Given adoption of digital pathology remains very nascent, particularly in some key markets such as the US, a vendor risks expending significant resource on developing a system, only to discover that it doesn’t meet the needs of potential customers.
An alternative strategy which, in the near term at least seems preferable, is the partnership route. Siemens Healthineers’ partnership with Proscia and Fujifilm’s partnership with Inspirata are the most high-profile examples of this strategy. In both instances an established medical imaging vendor is bolstering its enterprise imaging offering with tried and tested expertise from digital pathology specialists. While such partnerships lack some of the advantages of a solution developed internally, increased flexibility makes it a smart choice, certainly in the near to mid-term.
A third option is acquisition. While such a move requires greater commitment, the longer-term opportunity of digital pathology, in addition to the relative affordability of many digital pathology vendors means this could also be an attractive route. If a vendor can ensure it makes the right acquisition, in doing so it could pay dividends in the long term.
The Need for an Answer
Regardless of which strategy is selected, what is increasingly important is that a strategy is selected. One of the reasons Siemens Healthineers made a deal with Proscia when it did is that deals in Western Europe increasingly include digital pathology as key component. These providers, and for provider in the US also adopting the requirement, are stipulating pathology provision in deals, but may not wish to include digital pathology as part of a broader enterprise imaging strategy immediately. They may not even have the infrastructure and equipment to do so. However, these providers know the opportunities digital pathology offers in the future and need to ensure that the imaging IT vendor they select, an agreement which could last 7-10 years, must have a strategy in place for facilitating their transition to digital pathology when they need it.
Imaging IT vendors looking to secure such holistic deals need to show providers they are knowledgeable about the needs of digital pathology and options for implementation. This includes accommodating hardware preferences and the input from pathologists (e.g. scanner fleet, best-of-breed research, and clinical analysis software applications), while also helping providers to capitalise on external possibilities including transitions to cloud deployments etc. More importantly, however, IT vendors must be able to highlight the economic benefits that become possible with a connected digital path lab.
Ultimately this is what will help informatics vendors win deals that include pathology. The scanner hardware used, and the specifics of digital pathology set ups will vary from provider to provider, but, if potential value can be realised and measured at the point of diagnosis and across the wider enterprise, adoption will grow.
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This Insight is part of your subscription to Signify Premium Insights – Medical Imaging. This content is only available to individuals with an active account for this paid-for service and is the copyright of Signify Research. Content cannot be shared or distributed to non-subscribers or other third parties without express written consent from Signify Research. To view other recent Premium Insights that are part of the service please click here
