The National Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC) is expanding its activities to cover more hospital trusts.
It has received a second round of funding, taking the total to £50 million, under the Data to Early Diagnosis and Precision Medicine challenge.
This will enable it to build on the current service provided to six trusts in the north of England under a deal with healthcare imaging IT company Sectra. It said the new five-year agreement will enable more NHS trusts to digitise pathology.
It will also allow NPIC to create two new specialist digital pathology networks in paediatrics and sarcoma tissue cancers, enabling national referral networks to provide the best diagnoses for these rare cancers.
Professor Darren Treanor, NPIC’s director and a practising pathologist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Digital pathology is now a national priority. Many NHS hospitals want to take advantage of this powerful technology to deliver a better service for patients.
“With NPIC, we hope to provide a proven model, underpinned with advanced technology from Sectra, that will help many more hospitals quickly realise their ambitions and benefit from the groundwork we have already done.”
Addressing clinical priorities
Basharat Hussain, deployment director at NPIC, added: “Our work may have begun with a regional focus, but we are moving to address some significant clinical priorities nationally in areas like paediatrics and sarcoma cancer, where pathology specialists are especially scarce. We have now identified a significantly bigger application for our programme.
“We have shown how digital pathology can work and we can help the rest of the NHS replicate and scale using our learnings, in order to get pathology digitised to support better patient care.”
NPIC is a collaborative of NHS trusts, academia and industry partners led by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and laboratories in the surrounding region.
Its agreement with Sectra follows a separate November announcement from the UK Government that commits £248 million over the next year to help modernise NHS diagnostics using the latest technology.
