Journal Article

298 Digital Pathology Cost Effective—Fact or Fiction?

Pavlidakey, Peter, Fasciano, Danielle

2018

Overview

Abstract Introduction Over the past five years, there has been a rise in digital pathology services. As a result, healthcare providers deduce that this may enable them to save time and costs. More importantly, there is a conception that digital pathology may rectify the hindrance of slide storage and sharing abilities. However, this is fraught with peril, as companies have become aware of the need for digital pathology services, and as a result, have drastically changed the manner in which the services are rendered, from via a pure user license to via a scan lease license, which has a fixed number of slide scans that can be performed. Materials and Methods Pricing of various scan lease licenses was analyzed and compared to the costs of maintaining slide storage at an institution. Considering that the cost to scan slides via a scan lease license is approximately one US dollar per slide (eg, scanning 40,000 slides would cost approximately $40,000), in addition to the expenses for specimen processing and slide preparation, the scan lease license does not appear to be practical for digitizing images for a large, high-volume university practice. Results and Conclusion The implementation of digital pathology appears most feasible for small, lower-volume pathology services. Given the analysis, we have deemed the cost of approximately $4,000 a year to maintain slide storage at our institution, in comparison to that of a scan lease license, which would take approximately 20 years to reach a break-even point economically. In conclusion, while digital pathology is highly sought after, most high-volume medical centers would find this method cost-prohibitive. Therefore, if the availability were made in the future, a single-cost slide scanner would likely alleviate this cost-prohibitive interference.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Subject: Pathology / Slide preparation