Precise and punctual communication between dermatology clinics and pathology labs is essential to provide patients with accurate results and swift turnaround times. Because over 90 percent of all tumors are confirmed by pathologists, physicians that utilize an EMR are increasingly interfacing with pathology laboratories to relay case results.

Integrating an EMR interface between your practice EHR and the lab can help increase operational efficiency, streamline staff workloads, and improve the quality of patient care and satisfaction.

Operational Efficiency 

Your patients expect an organized and efficient experience every time they interact with your clinic, and you can hold your laboratory to those same standards. Relying on a laboratory with outdated means of communication can negatively impact the quality of your experience, as well as impact patient care. 

Today, three out of five dermatologists have adopted an EMR into their practices. Interfacing with your laboratory’s information system takes full advantage of this record-keeping technology, creating a communication portal that instantly organizes and shares case data results. Integration into pathology reporting means clinics can use their existing EMR systems to automatically receive, review, search, and sort results on demand without additional clinic support staff involvement.

In Utah, Allen-Taintor Dermatology was used to sometimes waiting up to two weeks to receive results from the lab, which sometimes failed to send slides. Because the clinic wanted to review the slides before calling patients, this consistent issue was a concern. Once they began using PathologyWatch, Allen-Taintor Dermatology saw improved staff workflow efficiency, including a 75 percent reduction in dermatologist review time, which further improved efficiency. Patient satisfaction likewise improved because the physicians could review the results with their patients on digital slides.

System Setup

For those using an EMR in clinic, the advantages of an interface are clear. Building an interface between your EMR and the laboratory in a way that optimizes workflow efficiencies is not always straightforward and requires an experienced IT professional.

By partnering with a trusted full-service dermatopathology laboratory like PathologyWatch, clinics can rely on experienced engineers to architect their interfaces in a way that optimizes their EHR capabilities to maximize internal clinic efficiencies.  

Streamline Workloads

For many clinics, paper continues to be the gold standard for documenting and sharing records. For clinics that have moved to an EHR, however, additional benefits can be realized if your laboratory is fully integrated. For example, a well-designed interface can make handwriting requisition forms and physically making carbon copies a thing of the past. You can also reduce the probability of errors by digitally sending that information to the laboratory, as clinic data must be re-entered into the LIS and attached to the sample when received on paper forms. 

Patient Satisfaction

Delivering reliable and timely results to your patients should be a high priority for every dermatology clinic and dermatopathology laboratory. After patients have a biopsy taken, many experience an uneasy suspense while waiting for their results. This was the case for Allen-Taintor Dermatology. Once they were able to utilize digital biopsy images to show patients their pathology during visits, their high patient satisfaction increased even more. EMR interfaces and optimal laboratory processes can reduce the turnaround time from when a biopsy is taken to when a result is received, resulting in a better quality of care and patient satisfaction.

An additional benefit to patient safety and satisfaction is that interfaces can also improve data integrity and results delivery, decreasing the risk of a data entry error in both the clinic and laboratory.

In summary, building and utilizing a well-developed interface between the clinic EMR and laboratory system can help to improve operational efficiency, simplify staff workloads, and improve the quality of patient care and satisfaction.

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Is your dermatology practice ready for digital pathology? Most physicians feel the need to create a more efficient patient care process, but many don’t realize the far-reaching advantages of using a digital pathology workflow. 

According to a 2018 survey of US healthcare consumers and physicians, up to 69 percent of physicians, including dermatologists, are interested in increasing the use of digital tools to improve patient care, among other purposes. Due to recent advances in digital pathology, there is an alternative for dermatology clinics that typically rely on microscopy and glass slides: the online access of digital slides and reads from academic-level dermatopathologists. Companies like PathologyWatch, which offers whole-slide imaging to dermatologists, are helping digital pathology quicken its pace to the forefront of dermatology patient care. 

As complications like COVID-19 force healthcare providers to consider alternative options to traditional office visits, dermatologists must find a way to abide by HIPAA guidelines while remaining profitable. Experts agree that a digital system can be cost neutral and even save money for medical practices. 

Three critical factors contribute to a successful dermatology practice: efficiency, accessibility, and customer satisfaction. Each of these can improve with the adoption of a digital pathology platform.

1. Digital pathology is the solution for a more efficient and profitable pathology process.

According to experts, current trends in the traditional pathology model were already facing transformation. Based on data collected by DARK Daily, between 2007 and 2017, the pathologist workforce reduced its numbers by almost 18 percent, while the pathologist’s diagnostic workload rose by 41.7 percent. 

Such imbalance is a formula for potential disaster as technicians scramble to meet lab work demands while using manual processes to prepare slides, mail specimens, collect and organize test results, and input data for each patient’s specimen slide. 

Those who work in labs recognize that a digital pathology system may help to reduce errors and create efficiency, even while the workload increases. Fortunately, adopting a digital workflow and imaging system reduces the risk of mistakes while inputting data, eliminates redundancy in handling slides, and speeds up the process for issuing test results. Laboratories that provide digital images of the glass slides can also result in 24/7 access to slides by clinicians.

2. Digitized slides enable collaboration among specialists.

With whole-slide images digitally cataloged, doctors can easily access a patient’s specimen themselves and securely share it anywhere and anytime with fellow pathologists. Such collaborative practices heighten the quality of care at all participating facilities rather than limiting expertise to one or two locations. “We place a lot of value in consulting, case sharing, and communicating in our practice so that each hospital receives the benefit of our combined knowledge and experience,” says Nicolas G. Cacciabeve, MD, a managing member at Advanced Pathology Associates. 

Cacciabeve adds that incorporating whole-slide imaging into their practice workflow has led to an improvement in the way they do things. “It drives efficiency and improves access to expertise,” he says. 

The ability to extend patient care to those who often face challenges accessing specialized care is an exciting feature of digital technology. For healthcare professionals, providing treatment to the most vulnerable communities, particularly those in rural communities, is a constant challenge. 

According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, almost 25 percent of Americans living in rural areas do not have a primary care provider (PCP) or health center where they can receive regular medical services. And with skin cancer ranking as the most common form of cancer in the US, people living in rural, agricultural areas could particularly benefit from access to dermatopathologists, who can examine a digitalized specimen and work with a local physician to design a treatment plan. Such services wouldn’t be possible without digital pathology technology.

3. Improve customer confidence with a digital platform.

The expanded access and collaboration available with the adoption of digital pathology also results in equivalent or improved patient outcomes. Zoltan Laszik, MD, PhD, professor of clinical pathology at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, directed a team to collect results between 30 pathologists and 800 test slides distributed among three hospitals. “There was not a single case that was misdiagnosed because of the digital technology, and the benefits were immediate from hospital to hospital,” Laszik says. By improving access to expertise and facilitating collaboration, Laszik and Cacciabeve see digital pathology as a vehicle to increase the speed and accuracy of diagnosis while innovating the modern standard of patient care. 

While digital technology isn’t new, the possibilities digital pathology creates for the dermatopathology field to streamline lab processes, expand patient access to specialized care, and improve customer satisfaction are exciting and work together to ultimately help physicians take better care of their patients.