The Northern Cancer Alliance has signed a five year deal with Sectra to deliver a ground-breaking digital pathology solution across the North East of England and North Cumbria.
The solution aims to improve cancer care workflows through enabling pathologists to instantly access and share images and information between departments and locations.
The Alliance covers nine hospitals that provide or use pathology services: City Hospitals Sunderland, County Durham and Darlington, Gateshead Health, North Cumbria University Hospitals, Northumbria Healthcare, North Tees and Hartlepool Hospitals, South Tees Hospitals, South Tyneside and The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals.
As a result of the deal, they will scan pathology slides and send the images to a single data repository. This will mean that clinicians working anywhere in the region will have access to the information, making it easier for them access patient information, ask for second opinions, and hold multi-disciplinary team meetings.
Dr Paul Barrett, histopathologist at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust and co-clinical lead of the project “Digital pathology will be an enabler for collaborative working across large geographic areas, streamlining pathology diagnostic decision making, particularly for cancer diagnosis and multidisciplinary team meeting discussions. This represents the biggest and most exciting change to the way Cellular Pathologist work in a generation.”
Dr Sonali Natu, histopathologist at North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and the other co-clinical lead of the project, adds “As an integrated health and care system, we need to move away from isolation and head towards integration. This platform will deliver a large part of that ambition for the patients we serve. The digital access to pathology images and digital tools for reviewing them will in the end translate into easier collaboration, more resilient services and improved patient care.”
The solution will support 115 pathologists across the trusts, conducting an average of 300,000 examinations a year. They will be able to access all pathology images produced by the consortium and get one consolidated view of a patient record from a single interface.
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