A Day Inside the Fully Digital Pathology Lab

Plenty of labs have digital pathologists. Far fewer have digital labs. The difference comes down to how much of the workflow actually moves into software. When only the slide reading goes digital, the pathologist gains a screen but the rest of the lab keeps working by hand: tracking slides on paper, chasing scans through email, reconciling billing codes across systems.

NovoPath built its digital pathology LIS software to close that gap. To see what that looks like in practice, it helps to follow a case through the lab and watch how each team experiences the day.

Accessioning: The Case Gets One Home

A specimen arrives and gets accessioned in NovoPath. From that moment, the case has a single record that will hold everything that follows: the specimen details, the slides, the images, the report, and the billing.

That single record changes the rest of the day. In a split-system lab, the case lives in the LIS while the images will eventually land in a separate image management system, connected by an interface that matches identifiers between two databases. In NovoPath, no second database exists to keep in sync. The case already owns everything that will happen to it.

Histology: Every Slide Accounted For

As the histology team cuts and stains, NovoPath tracks every slide the case should include. That covers the original slides along with recuts, levels, and special stains ordered along the way.

This tracking solves one of the most frustrating problems in digital pathology. In many labs, the pathologist becomes the last person to learn that a case isn’t ready, often after opening it and finding a stain missing. NovoPath confirms that a case is complete before it reaches the pathologist’s worklist. Histotechs see what remains outstanding, and pathologists receive cases they can actually finish.

Scanning: No Retyping, No Guesswork

When slides hit the scanner, the slide barcode, the scan file, and the LIS case match automatically. Nobody retypes an accession number or manually links an image to a patient. Every image stays tied to the right patient from the start.

Scans do not always go perfectly. A slide comes out blurry, or a scan fails partway through. In a disconnected setup, someone has to notice the problem, flag it, and remember to follow up. In NovoPath, failed or blurry scans become tracked tasks with an owner. The issue stays visible until someone resolves it, and nothing slips quietly through the cracks.

Labs also keep the scanners they already own. NovoPath works with existing hardware, so the scanning team does not need to learn new equipment just because the lab went digital.

The Worklist: Digital and Glass Together

Most labs will run a mix of digital and glass cases for a long time. Some specimens get scanned. Others get read under the microscope. Some cases include both.

In many digital setups, that mix creates two separate queues with different rules, and lab managers end up balancing work across both. NovoPath puts digital and glass cases into one shared worklist governed by the same rules. Case assignment, prioritization, and turnaround tracking all work the same way regardless of how the slides get read.

Sign-Out: Reading and Reporting in One Place

For the pathologist, the biggest change shows up at sign-out. Instead of reading slides in one window and writing the report in another, the pathologist works from a single view. Every slide opens with the correct patient record attached, so the diagnosis happens on the right patient, every time.

Pathologists can use the viewer their lab already relies on or work with the viewer built into NovoPath to review images alongside the case. Because NovoPath runs in the cloud, pathologists can also access cases from wherever they work, whether that means another site in the network or a remote reading arrangement.

Billing: Digital Codes Captured Automatically

Digital pathology now carries more than 40 Category III add-on codes. Those codes formally recognize that digitization adds work to the laboratory. They also represent revenue that labs frequently leave on the table.

When billing teams reconcile digital codes by hand across two systems, mistakes and missed charges follow. NovoPath captures digitization add-on codes directly on the case and pairs them with the primary service, with no second entry. By the time the case closes, the billing picture already reflects the digital work the lab performed.

Leadership: One Set of Numbers

At the end of the day, lab leadership needs to understand performance. How long do cases take? Where do bottlenecks form? How much of the volume runs digitally, and how does it compare to glass?

When digital and glass work live in separate systems, answering those questions means stitching reports together. NovoPath keeps digital and glass in the same numbers, with analytics drawn from one source of truth. Leaders see the whole lab instead of two partial views.

What the Day Adds Up To

Follow a single case through a NovoPath lab and a pattern emerges. At every stage, a handoff disappears:

• Accessioning creates one record instead of two.
  
• Histology sees missing slides before the pathologist does.
  
• Scanning links images to patients automatically and turns failures into tracked tasks.
  
• The worklist treats digital and glass cases the same way.
  
• Sign-out happens in one place, on the right patient.
  
• Billing captures digital codes without manual reconciliation.
  
• Leadership reports from one set of numbers.
  

None of those changes depends on a single dramatic feature. Together, they explain why some labs feel slower after going digital and others feel faster. The difference lies in whether the workflow lives in one system or gets stretched across several.

Built for Every Pathology Specialty

More than 300 laboratories use NovoPath to run anatomic, molecular, clinical, cytology, and veterinary pathology workflows from one platform. NovoPath was the first enterprise LIS to move to the cloud, and it now brings digital pathology into that same system, so the entire lab moves forward together.

A digital pathologist marks a good start. A digital lab delivers the full benefit. NovoPath gives laboratories the platform to get there, with one record, one worklist, and one partner accountable for the whole day’s work.