A large Midwest healthcare provider powers the best possible patient care with Digital Pathology

Industry

Healthcare

Challenge

Traditional pathology is slow, impacting patient care

Solution

Iron Mountain Digital Pathology solutions

Value

Digitizing slide images for pathology accelerates patient care and provides revenue growth opportunities—by monetizing slides with other providers—to fund more research, further enhancing patient care.

Digital Pathology gains accuracy and speed, embracing innovation

A leading healthcare provider prioritizes patient health above all else. To support this mission, the provider continuously innovates and collaborates. Newfound capabilities help the organization proactively discover breakthrough treatments, pioneer advanced procedures, and provide world-class, personalized care for patients with complex, chronic diseases.

On its journey to deliver the best patient care possible, the healthcare provider leverages data, information technology, and partnerships in novel ways. An alignment with a renowned academic medical center is expanding its possibilities for pathology. As a result, pathologist and researchers are working with Iron Mountain to adopt an innovative approach to digital pathology. This includes rapid access to whole slide images (WSIs), efficient image management promoting research and collaboration, and a robust digital image library.

Accelerating the adoption of digital pathology is crucial to advancing patient care through speed and collaboration, particularly as accuracy and haste are vital for patients with chronic diseases, such as cancer. The large healthcare provider’s digital pathology journey started by digitizing slides, but they quickly realized how overwhelming storage management is for large WSIs. They turned to Iron Mountain for assistance in effectively and efficiently handling petabytes of WSI storage. Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud answered this need with secure storage and rapid retrieval in a cost-effective way.

Initially, Iron Mountain is helping to digitize 1.5 million slides that the provider stores with us. Future phases include scanning the repository of approximately 20 million physical glass slides. As a result, the healthcare provider is better positioned to allow researchers to train algorithms on critical histopathological features, enabling the development of computer-aided tools. Additionally, pathologists benefit as they interact with complex image data, improving training and education.

Every minute counts

In pathology, time is crucial. Instead of waiting for physical slides, the Digital Pathology solution allows researchers and pathologists to gain ready access to patient WSIs—for research, training, and monetization. Labs often struggle with efficiently retrieving large volumes of archived slides for review. Digitizing slides eliminates retrieval and delivery delays associated with physical slides and enables better collaboration among pathologists and researchers. Iron Mountain’s Digital Pathology solution reduces the wait time for slides from up to 8 days to 24 hours or less.

The large healthcare provider chose Iron Mountain for its operational scale and fast turnaround times. If handled internally, the healthcare provider would have taken multiple years and millions in capital expenditures to scan, organize, and store the slides. Iron Mountain is completing the entire project within 12 months while providing access to slides during digitization. In addition, each slide has a unique barcode, and all the data is tracked and indexed throughout the scanning process, laying the foundation for scalability.

“We asked Iron Mountain to digitize a massive quantity of slides in a very short time. They met our requirements—something we could not achieve with our internal resources or from any other vendor. We are thrilled that Iron Mountain is helping us accelerate and elevate our digital pathology strategic vision,” shared an executive at the large healthcare organization.

The unmatched capability of an end-to-end solution

The large healthcare provider values Iron Mountain’s Digital Pathology solution for its unique end-to-end pathology services and secure chain of custody. This capability spans both physical and WSIs. Iron Mountain augments the healthcare provider’s resources by offering slide digitization, storage and storage management, and image management. These integrated, cohesive capabilities are unmatched, providing extraordinary value to healthcare providers.

“Piecemeal solutions are problematic, creating inefficiencies and overwhelming our internal resources. Iron Mountain’s comprehensive, end-to-end solution is a huge advantage for us, helping cement our selection of Iron Mountain to handle this important and transformational digital pathology project,” stated the executive.

The win-win-win of digital slides

With a digital library of pathology WSIs, the large healthcare provider can expand possibilities beyond its own walls. Slides and data can help other healthcare organizations advance patient care more broadly while monetizing the WSIs. That incremental revenue can fund additional research at the large healthcare provider and further elevate patient care.

Here’s an example. In support of the oncology department, researchers can leverage data for improved patient discovery and pathology. Anonymized data can be pulled for cohort studies, such as finding 200 female patients, 50-60 years old, with a negative BRCA test, who also developed breast cancer. Historically, the BRCA test information is stored as unstructured data, requiring researchers to open PDFs and assess and assemble records manually. By automating data retrieval, researchers can save precious time and improve precision—at scale.

The large Midwest healthcare provider stays on the leading edge in realizing its mission using technological innovations like the Iron Mountain Digital Pathology solution.

Learn more about Iron Mountain Digital Pathology Solutions.