Gestalt Diagnostics
Empowering the Pathologist's Venture into Digital

Pathology, as the bridge between science and medicine, plays a pivotal role in healthcare, from aiding diagnostic assessment to providing treatment insights. To render medical diagnoses, a pathologist’s traditional workflow constitutes manually reviewing a specimen on a glass slide under the microscope. However, because of the time and risks involved in the transfer of physical slides across different laboratories in various locations, initial diagnoses and subsequent second opinions were frequently delayed. This brought about the migration of the typical pathology workflow into digitized workflows that greatly benefitted pathologists by streamlining their processes and reducing turnaround times. And when COVID-19 entered the scene, digital pathology made it possible to support the safety, efficacy, and continuation of high-quality health care and diagnosis opportunities.

As the market stepped up its understanding of the value that digital pathology is able to provide to the industry, Washington-based Gestalt Diagnostics was already leading the forefront with their next-level pathology software solutions. “Gestalt Diagnostics provides software modules, industry-leading connectivity, and support services to empower pathologists in generating objective and reproducible results while increasing productivity and efficiency,” says Lisa-Jean Clifford, COO and Chief Strategy Officer of Gestalt Diagnostics. The company’s software platform allows pathologists to acquire, through interoperability and interfacing, all of the patient data instantaneously as soon as that patient’s case information comes in. With all the data accessible in a single location, pathologists can read, interpret and diagnose patient information within a matter of minutes versus hours or days of waiting for information.

Gestalt Diagnostics also enables artificial intelligence algorithms to be built directly within the workflow for healthcare and pathology laboratories to be able to optimize and streamline their workflow through their interoperable platform.

“There’s a significant efficiency and time gain in being able to provide all of the information in a digital workflow,” says Lisa-Jean.

Gestalt Diagnostics provides software modules, industry-leading connectivity and support services to empower pathologists in generating objective and reproducible results while increasing productivity and efficiency

The company’s incorporation of artificial intelligence directly within that workflow aids the pathologist in identifying regions of potential diagnostic interest and assists with calculations such as generating grading and scores of positive areas of tumors. Pathologists can utilize that information as a diagnostic aid, which speeds up their interpretation, diagnosis, and recommendations for treatment.

Further, to streamline interfacing, Gestalt Diagnostics’ secure cloud-hosted interface engine helps integrate interfaces to multiple different applications, both hardware or software, for laboratories and other healthcare entities in multiple locations. “We are not only able to get interfaces up in a matter of hours, but we also host and support all of those interfaces for the laboratories,” says Lisa-Jean. The platform provides alerts, helps maintain uptimes, and supports interfaces to regulatory and cancer reporting agencies, among many other functions.

Lisa-Jean recalls how the cloud-hosted platform particularly benefitted a customer looking to implement digital pathology to serve their pathologists in remote locations. They wanted to eliminate the need to ship and courier glass slides among their different facilities. At the same time, they needed to enable their multiple pathologists throughout the country to access their patient cases to diagnose them. Through Gestalt Diagnostics’ interoperable platform, the customer was able to support all their remotely located pathologists digitally. This also cut the timeframe down for the pathologists to have access to the case information by days. Additionally, as a result of this, the customer was able to bring on incremental work and negotiate a significant increase in business from other laboratories by taking over their testing.

This brings the focus to Gestalt Diagnostics’ artificial intelligence requisition engine (AIRE) built to help laboratories that would usually handle high volume cases and accessioning manually. The AIRE reduces the time it takes to manually accession a case by up to 75 percent using Gestalt Diagnostics’ AI algorithm for requisition handling and increases the accuracy by eliminating manual entry errors.

With their sights set on continued growth, Gestalt Diagnostics has partnered with a variety of AI vendors as they bring a number of new customers on board. The company is also looking to expand its footprint into Europe, and continue to provide the benefits of digital pathology to more laboratories.