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21 June 2017

AZ Sint-Jan’s digital pathology project, of which LIS DaVinci was a core component, wins an Agoria e-Health Award

When AZ Sint-Jan AV Brugge-Oostende wanted to go digital with its pathology department, it turned to Philips’s digital pathology solution and MIPS’ LIS DaVinci. Now, the forward-looking “Digital Pathology – The end of the microscope” project has received Agoria’s E-Health Award for « Best Innovation Project (Patient Care), Patient Response or Medical Practice Support. It is great recognition for a project and team that aim to help pathology play its role in better patient care ».

Innovation improving care

Agoria is Belgium’s largest employers’ organization and trade association, bringing together some 1700 technology companies and 275,000 employees. Each year, Agoria organises its e-Health Awards, for innovative e-Health projects that aim to simplify administration and optimise workflow, to ultimately enable better and more qualitative care for patients.

2017 marked the 7th occurrence of the e-Health Awards. At the award ceremony held on June 1 in Tervuren, in the presence of Belgian Minister of Health Maggie De Block, AZ Sint-Jan was selected as the winner in the category “E-Health Award for Best Innovation Project (Patient Care), Patient Response or Medical Practice Support”.

In classical pathology, the pathologist views slides physically, on a microscope. With digital pathology, the slides are scanned using a high-resolution scanner, and the pathologist views digital images of the slides on a screen. Our LIS DaVinci fully embeds this technological innovation into the existing workflow.

Together, Philips’s digital pathology solution and LIS DaVinci provide AZ Sint-Jan with very high quality, sharp images, while a range of digital tools are available for diagnostics. Images can be shared with just a click of the mouse, to enable expert consultancy or support to teaching activities.

“Digital pathology creates so many exciting possibilities for remote consultancy and collaboration, for example; digital platforms for centralisation of rare diseases, digital interpretation of immunohistochemistry. It eliminates the drawbacks of working in pathology, such as discomfort from using a microscope and slides all over our desks. We sleep better, too, as patient safety has improved,” explains Dr. Ivo Van den Berghe, director of the Anatomical Pathology laboratory at AZ Sint-Jan, Campus Brugge.

“This project is the result of the collective effort of our hospital’s management, IT department and technical service, MIPS and Philips, and the entire pathology department. We are thus very proud of our nomination by Agoria. Of course, the excellent image quality, perfect traceability of slides, and availability of diagnostic tools ensure that the ultimate winner will always be the patient himself.”

“After having won a similar award in 2013 together with Roche and the Heilig Hart hospital in Tienen, we are very pleased that AZ Sint-Jan has taken home an e-Health Award in 2017,” notes Pieter De Smet, Director Anapath Solutions, MIPS. “AZ Sint-Jan is the first hospital in Belgium to support the full routine workflow using digital pathology. Our LIS DaVinci is playing a key role in this transition, and helping the lab to be prepared for the future.”

“This recognition is also a confirmation of our focus at MIPS to provide added value to the daily work of our customers. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank both the AZ Sint-Jan and Philips teams for the excellent collaboration throughout the project. I’m looking forward to supporting our other customers – in Belgium and abroad – on their road to digital pathology and delivering better patient care,” concludes Pieter.

Read more about the digital pathology project and the role of the LIS DaVinci solution, in the case study about the AZ Sint-Jan project.