Pathologist shortage and recruitment, lab competitiveness and AI algorithms drive digital pathology adoption
In the most traditional definition of return-on-investment, Sam Terese, former CEO and president of Alverno Laboratories, would say that his company isn’t experiencing a strict apples-to-apples financial return on its digital pathology investment.
Terese likes to take a broader view of ROI that includes accuracy of tissue analysis, making his pathologists’ lives easier and better positioning his lab to be competitive to prospective employees and for customers.
“It’s also about what will it do for patient care and how might it improve outcomes, how might it make us better in the marketplace, and how might it help us attract physicians, patients,” said Terese, whose laboratory serves hospitals in Indiana and Illinois became an early adopter of digital pathology in 2017.
Initially, Alverno chose digital pathology to more efficiently process samples for the 5,000 slides at its door every evening that need to get out by 8 a.m. the next day, Terese said. But, today, he said, using digital pathology also improves workforce morale because the technology makes pathologists’ jobs easier.
“For all the tasks we hate to do, all those little things we do on a regular basis, and all of those things that we spend an inordinate amount of time on – such as counting mitotic figures, looking for tiny little areas of microinvasion and looking for tiny little areas of perineural invasion, AI does that very very well,” said Dr. Meiklejohn McKenzie, pathologist, co-owner and laboratory medical director, Community Pathology Laboratory. “It never gets tired, it never takes a break, and it never gets fatigued. It just makes our lives easier.”
Digital pathology assists in recruiting/retaining pathologists
Digital pathology has transformed usual ways of working. So much so, that some pathologists are reluctant to review glass slides under the microscope when they have access to whole slide images.
McKenzie said when his lab had to revert to manual workflows recently, pathologists were reluctant to go back to the old method of reviewing samples under glass, even briefly. The pathologists chose to wait until digital pathology was once again available because they prefer to access the benefits of digital pathology tools and review cases digitally instead of reviewing glass slides under a traditional microscope.
Offering digital pathology now is helping his lab attract pathologists, especially those earlier in their career, said McKenzie.
“We have experience recruiting younger pathologists recently and we knew we had a digital pathology platform to offer them,” McKenzie said. “Younger generations were excited about it and I think it gave us an edge when recruiting them. We had advantages to them that they didn’t have from other practices recruiting them.”
However, digital pathology and its use of artificial intelligence varied algorithms will not be replacing pathologists, McKenzie said.
Digital pathology’s potential to assist with workforce shortage
Both McKenzie and Terese mentioned a diminishing pathology workforce as a concern in running pathology labs. CAP Today’s president addressed the shortage as recently as 2024. While more current data doesn’t exist, at least one older study pointed to an estimated anatomic pathologist workforce shortage in the 2020s.
“There are fewer and fewer pathologists every day, so anything that allows us to provide that service without a pathologist is really important,” Terese said. “I’m not saying it’s going to replace pathologists but it will be a key supplement to the workforce.”
Disclaimer: Roche and third-party algorithms on Roche Digital Pathology Open Environment are for Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
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