Deciphex COO Mairin Rafferty and CEO Donal O'Shea. Photo credit: Deciphex
September 13, 2022 — Deciphex, a Dublin, Ireland-based provider of digital pathology software and services, has announced the launch of their Diagnexia service in the United States. The announcement was made during the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Annual Meeting, held in Chicago, Sept. 7-9, 2022, which commemorated the Society's 100th Anniversary.
Diagnexia virtual pathology service provides on-demand access to remote subspecialty experts for pathology consult services on an advanced collaborative platform. This provides significant support to overworked and under-staffed pathology departments without experts available on every subspeciality, the statement noted. Diagnexia is the first fully digital, subspeciality led, remote diagnostic and consult service, delivering a global network of subspecialty pathology experts to ease pathology bottlenecks, accelerate diagnoses and enhance patient outcomes.
The platform connects laboratories to an international network of subspeciality pathologists, who can provide their expertise on clinical cases, while vastly reducing turnaround times and ensuring delivery of the highest quality of patient care. Busy academic teams within hospital networks will also benefit from having extra experts available on demand to help balance workloads. Eligible retiring pathologists may join the Diagnexia network and work remotely part-time.
The company statement noted that pathology is heading for a crunch point due to increasing volumes, increasing complexity and flat to declining pathologist numbers. Pathologists are in high demand worldwide, and their number is predicted to significantly decrease over the next ten years. Deciphex’s platform will allow for key cancer centers in the U.S. to use digital pathology in order to:
- Improve patient care with the right pathologist viewing the right slide at the soonest possible moment.
- Cut costs by converting to a digital workflow, both the sending and receiving institution saves on packaging, shipping cost and employee hours.
- Eliminate data entry (and potential errors) in the receiving and accessioning stage with LIS integration
Donal O’Shea, Deciphex Chief Executive Officer, offered this in the announcement:
“The US launch of Diagnexia is an important milestone for the business in its ambition to use Digital Pathology and AI to provide easy access to the world’s leading pathologists. Chronic issues in Pathology, such as burgeoning patient wait times, recruitment, demand for expertise and diagnostic complexity has necessitated a new approach to improving patient care. Even well-resourced healthcare systems with relatively ‘High-Pathologist Density’ have a chronic lack of capacity leading to backlogs, delayed diagnosis, care and patient outcomes. The ability to alleviate these difficulties with seamless, state of the art technology is game-changing and ultimately of huge benefit to patients, health services, and pathology labs.”
Deciphex is a key member of BigPicture (bigpicture.eu), a major EU funded initiative to build the world's biggest central repository of digital pathology slides to boost the development of AI.
For more information: https://www.deciphex.com/
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December 06, 2023 
