Digital Pathology Operations at an NYC Tertiary Cancer Center During the First 4 Months of COVID-19 Pandemic Response

Academic Pathology

article

Orly Ardon¹  Christine England¹  David S. Klimstra²  Matthew G. Hanna¹  Victor E. Reuter¹  Meera Hameed¹  Lorraine Corsale¹  Allyne Manzo¹  Sahussapont J. Sirintrapun¹  Peter Ntiamoah¹  Evangelos Stamelos¹  Peter J. Schueffler¹ 

[1] Department of Pathology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center;The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

DOI  :  10.1177/23742895211010276

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Sage Journals

【 摘 要 】

Implementation of an infrastructure to support digital pathology began in 2006 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The public health emergency and COVID-19 pandemic regulations in New York City required a novel workflow to sustain existing operations. While regulatory enforcement discretions offered faculty workspace flexibility, a substantial portion of laboratory and digital pathology workflows require on-site presence of staff. Maintaining social distancing and offering staggered work schedules. Due to a decrease in patients seeking health care at the onset of the pandemic, a temporary decrease in patient specimens was observed. Hospital and travel regulations impacted onsite vendor technical support. Digital glass slide scanning activities onsite proceeded without interruption throughout the pandemic, with challenges including staff who required quarantine due to virus exposure, unrelated illness, family support, or lack of public transportation. During the public health emergency, we validated digital pathology systems for a remote pathology operation. Since March 2020, the departmental digital pathology staff were able to maintain scanning volumes of over 100 000 slides per month. The digital scanning team reprioritized archival slide scanning and participated in a remote sign-out validation and successful submission of New York State approval for a laboratory developed test. Digital pathology offers a health care delivery model where pathologists can perform their sign out duties at remote location and prevent disruptions to critical pathology services for patients seeking care at our institution during emergencies. Development of standard operating procedures to support digital workflows will maintain turnaround times and enable clinical operations during emergency or otherwise unanticipated events.

【 授权许可】

CC BY|CC BY-NC