Clinisys and mTuitive partner on digital pathology bundle

Clinisys has formed a partnership with mTuitive and integrated its xPert™ reporting solution with the Clinisys WinPath Enterprise laboratory information system and VUE diagnostic console, a patient care and lab workflow system.  

Simon Hurst, VP, global strategic partnerships and business development observed that there remains a large disparity between the demand for cellular pathology and the histopathologists available to meet it. 

He said: “That is putting a huge focus on digitisation, to make the best use of the resource available, and to enable people to work remotely, if that is what they want to do.

“We see synoptic reporting (reporting specific data elements in a specific format within a surgical pathology report) as fitting within the digital pathology bundle that we need to provide to customers looking to address those challenges. 

“At the same time, there is a best practice and a compliance aspect to this. The Royal College of Pathologists sets standards for pathology reports and the NHS wants to collect the Cancer Outcomes and Services Data set (COSD) for the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and others; and that’s complex.” 

Colin Murphy, chief executive of mTuitive said: “There are other ways to do COSD, but it’s a very hard thing to do well. mTuitive is the leading provider of structured reporting worldwide. We have done it with lots of different standards and reporting regimes; and it’s hard because they change all the time. 

Saving time for clinicians 

Murphy added: “xPert is built around checklists, and there’s a lot of logic that goes into them. We take the standards we have been talking about and we put them into xPert and add our secret sauce.”

“We get the results reviewed by the protocol authors and then create a release to send out as a ‘gold standard’ checklist. Some customers will want customisations, which we can handle. 

“Pathologists can choose a checklist for a particular tumour in xPert and the reporting program will auto-fill a lot of the information they need, saving them time,” he said, adding: “and, of course, it will be included in a format that means it can be sent back to external data collectors automatically.” 

Based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, mTuitive develop structured reporting solutions for cancer, primarily in line with national standards such the College of American Pathologists (CAP), Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath) and the International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR).

In the UK, NHS Trusts were able to meet the latest Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD) reporting requirements.