Friend, colleagues, distinguished guests… The clock is ticking; surgeons wait on results. Patients wait for a diagnosis. Oncologists hold a treatment plan. They are all waiting because of the surgical pathology turnaround time. It’s like a mini, quiet, laboratory-oriented epidemic, and in too many labs, the bottleneck is not the pathologist but rather the manual work the pathologist is buried under.
That’s exactly where a modern laboratory information system (LIS) changes the math, as the College of American Pathologists determined that at least 90% of routine surgical pathology cases should be reported within two days, but a quarter of routine cases miss that target.
The gap is real – it’s mainly operational.
And now it’s time to ask why it still exists and how we can close it efficiently.
Where Surgical Pathology Turnaround Time Actually Goes
Turnaround time (TAT) is much more than one delay. TAT is a metaphorical canister storing dozens of small delays, all stacked like cattle: accessioning, grossing, processing, embedding, sectioning, staining, sign-out, and reporting. It’s a messy canister, to say the least, and the challenge begins there.
A recent study of large or complex specimens reported a median turnaround time of 2.72 days, with wide variation across institutions and longer times for cases requiring special handling. One would argue that 2.72 days is a solid number because complexity adds time, and you cannot wish that away.
However, manual logbooks with handwritten labels, in addition to cases piling up on trays because no one knows they are ready…? These have nothing to do with diagnosis challenges. Moreover, retyping results from one system into another, just for the sake of doing it (because that’s what people are accustomed to), is far from effective. These are all man-made delays that basically split the main TAT challenge into two:
- The pre-analytic and the Intra-lab phases, in which a specimen moves from accessioning through the histology bench
- The diagnostic phase, in which the pathologist reads and signs out
Labs are used to blame the diagnostic phase; however, the first is where most of the recoverable time hides.
Does an LIS Cut Surgical Pathology Turnaround Time?
The short answer is yes, but we can’t settle for that, because the challenge is way deeper and more complex. And to truly come out victorious and solve the TAT challenge, we first need to understand that a modern LIS platform (preferably cloud-based, for reasons we’ll dive into later) is the place where automation earns its keep.
The point is not to make pathologists read faster, because why would we? What we really want is to eliminate the unnecessary time around the reading. An LIS does that by removing the manual handoffs where cases stall, with:
- Real-time case tracking
- Barcode-driven handoffs
- Worklist prioritization
- Synoptic reporting templates
- Automatic result delivery to the EHR
Using automation to achieve all of the above enables pathologists (and the lab that works with them) to have nothing sit idle because it was forgotten, with minimal-to-zero manual logs. With automated prioritization, urgent and complex cases surface first, and sign-out is faster and more complete. Eventually, with automation, reports reach the clinician the moment they are verified.
Because the challenge lies in the known paradigm, changing the paradigm requires the pattern to evolve: the system, not a person, will keep track of where every case is and what it needs next. Sounds simple and even silly, right? Well, you’d be surprised how many labs are working manually because of the force of habit.
One single change in the paradigm will create a total shift – automation collapses the redundant intervals where cases wait to be noticed. That’s exactly where most surgical pathology turnaround time quietly disappears.
GET PROACTIVE AND HACK YOUR LABWORK
How Cloud-Native LIS Wins on Surgical Pathology Turnaround Time
Instead of us telling you how amazing life is when your lab is using a cloud-based LIS, let’s talk about the research that found that workflow and staffing factors, not the difficulty of the diagnosis, drive much of the variation in turnaround time. As we all know, workflow is the part you and your staff actually control.
However, manual workflows simply take too much-needed time. A cloud-native LIS provides supervisors and stakeholders with live visibility across every site, balances workloads automatically, and never goes dark for a maintenance window in the middle of a busy afternoon.
And which clinical and pathology labs feel the change most? That’s right, multi-site labs. When several locations feed one platform, a backlog at one site can be rebalanced to a pathologist with capacity at another, instead of sitting in an endless queue. This is also true for labs considering scaling, as they’ll soon find that waiting for work to flow through a legacy system pipeline severely slows operations and causes other challenges.
The result is always the same – dramatic TAT, loss of ROI, and a decline in patient care.
➡️ DISCOVER HOW TO DO IT
