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.
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