Health Care Global became the first hospital in the country to completely digitise histopathology workflow for primary diagnosis at the HCG-Strand Laboratory at KR Road, Bengaluru. The hospital had introduced a US FDA approved digital pathology solution from Philips Intellisite Pathology Solutions and now the laboratory at HCG has successfully transformed to a 100 per cent digital lab for histopathology and computational pathology. The lab is also now accredited by College of American Pathologists (CAP) and National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), India, for its digital pathology facility in the fields of histopathology, cytopathology, frozen section facility as well as artificial intelligence- based breast algorithm.
Digital diagnosis is now the default diagnosis of the lab for surgical pathology and 100 per cent of FFPE slides (formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded) are digitally scanned into high-resolution digital images. These are then viewed, analysed, annotated and shared with other pathologists in the network in real time. Majority of the pathologists in the laboratory are now working digitally.
100 per cent of digital histopathology labs help patients by providing more accurate results and ease of access to expert opinions. It significantly improves the turnaround time for reports as well as cost-saving in terms of glass logistics of slides and blocks. Digitisation also means there is no longer worry about the risk of losing or damaging specimens in the transit.
