GE has announced an agreement to establish its first Global Pathology Imaging Centre of Excellence in Toronto, Ontario. GE and its digital pathology joint venture, Omnyx, will invest $7.75M along with a $2.25M grant from the Health Technology Commercialization Program created by HTX (Health Technology Exchange) and funded by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. Planned collaborative research and development partnerships will bring an additional $7.2M, for a total investment of $17.2M over the next 3 years (see: GE and the Government of Ontario Establish First Global Digital Pathology Centre of Excellence to Improve Patient Care). Three facts were listed at end of the press release that provided some insight for me about why the Canadian government was interested in jump-starting digital pathology:
- There is a shortage of pathologists in Canada. Today, there is a need for an additional 370 pathologists. By 2020 the country will need an additional 820 pathologists.
- An aging and growing population has been linked to a rising incidence of cancer increasing the need for timely access to pathology.
- Pathologists are handling workloads greater than the recommended benchmark established by the Canadian Association of Pathologists.
I initially thought that it was unusual for a governmental unit, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, to create a "center of excellence" in collaboration with a for-profit company. However, Canada is under pressure to address its shortage of pathologists in the face of an aging population. Digital pathology, conceptually, allows pathologists to work more efficiently. It also enables workload sharing and collaboration across large distances as well as the delivery of surgical pathology services to rural areas. There have been sporadic articles suggesting that the quality of surgical and clinical pathology services in Canada have been lacking (see, for example: Ontario pathology overhaul ordered). However and in a Lab Soft News guest blog posted nearly three years ago, the late Dr. Michael McNeely refuted the claim that pathology was disintegrating in Canada (see: Pathology Is Not Disintegrating in Canada!).
The bottom line for all of this is that, I suspect, Ontario wanted to rapidly deploy digital pathology services. In order to do so, it turned to GE's Omnyx, a company with excellent technology that has been somewhat late to market with its product line. GE/Omnyx brought a basket of money, $7.75M, to the table, which also gave them some credibility with the Canadian officials. One way for the company to compete with its established rivals and establish some "street credibility" would be through a large-scale digital pathology demonstration project such as this one planned in Ontario.
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