NYU Langone taps Philips to take its pathology digital

TORONTO—NYU Langone Health has tapped Philips to help take its pathology program fully digital—including translating its glass tissue slides into high-definition, shareable images and implementing artificial intelligence programs to aid in diagnosis.

The health system—which spans six inpatient hospital facilities, the Perlmutter Cancer Center, two medical school campuses, and over 300 outpatient locations across New York and Florida—aims to computerize its work amid a shortage of specialized pathologists and ahead of a rapidly aging population that is set to place even more demands on care.

“Since the dawn of pathology, our work has involved being hunched over looking at slides in the microscope in our offices after they’ve been manually delivered to us,” said Syed Hoda, a bone and soft tissue pathologist who will serve as NYU Langone’s director of digital pathology.

In an announcement last week, Hoda said that its slide images can now be distributed in real-time across the health system’s network, while avoiding potential shipping issues or sample degradation.

“Yesterday, I attended our first ‘digital’ tumor board,” Hoda said. “I instantly accessed entire cases live while discussing patients. Previously, retrieving glass slides from storage could delay clinical decisions by hours or even days.”

NYU Langone inked an eight-year, $115 million technology agreement with Philips in late 2023, which also covers informatics, handheld ultrasound and patient monitoring, in addition to the company’s IntelliSite digital pathology units. Among other labs, Philips has estimated pathologists have been able to complete cases about 15% to 25% faster compared to so-called analog methods.

“The ‘no brainer’ of it all is obvious,” Jeff DiLullo, Philips North America’s chief region leader, said in an interview at the AdvaMed MedTech Conference in Toronto, Canada.

“I can scan it, I can get it ready to put in the workflow, and then I have AI on top of that to help easily diagnose things or provide incidental findings that I may not have ever found,” DiLullo said. “All of that exists today.”

But changing a workflow is not as easy as flipping a switch. “One of the things we've realized, in moving to more of a software-led approach with AI… is that there is a change curve that adds clinical coaching to the hospital systems where we’re trying to deploy this,” DiLullo said. As part of the changeover, NYU Langone said its hospitals would be hiring 24 digital pathology coordinators, establishing a brand-new career path for the system.

“Getting people through that change curve is always the hardest thing, but injecting that capability is part and parcel to bringing new things that are FDA-cleared and compliant to the market,” he said. “Understanding the need for hospitals to be able to digest that workflow shift is something we've learned, and we’ve spent more time on building out our clinical teams to do it.”