In this episode, Dr. Matthew O. Leavitt takes us through his digital pathology journey and what he’s learned along the way. Dr. Leavitt’s vision has always been to use digital technologies to improve care, especially in remote areas. He shares his experiences implementing digital pathology, the challenges faced, and the realization that standardization of tissue handling (pre-analytics) is crucial for efficient digital pathology workflows. Their conversation touches on the current state of digital pathology, the need for collaborative models and consolidation of histology, and Dr. Leavitt’s optimism for the future of the field.
Dr. Matthew O. Leavitt is a Stanford-trained pathologist and a visionary leader in digital pathology. His journey began in the early 2000s when, as Department Chair at a major Utah-based medical center, he recognized the immense potential of digital pathology to transform diagnostics. In 2014, he founded Lumea, a pioneering digital pathology company designed to enhance lab workflow efficiency and drive standardization.
Building on this foundation, Dr. Leavitt launched PathNet in 2020, a groundbreaking hub-and-spoke virtual pathology practice that now delivers digital diagnostic services to underserved patient populations across 35 states.
His latest endeavor focuses on unlocking the power of patient health data through the DDx Foundation, where he is working to improve cross-sector data exchange between technology, life sciences, and healthcare organizations. A relentless innovator, Dr. Leavitt continues to push the boundaries of digital pathology, driving advancements that enhance diagnostic accuracy, accessibility, and patient care.
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Transcript:
James Thackeray: I’m James Thackeray, head of the Digital Diagnostic Summit Board and CCO of Lumea. And I want to give a really warm welcome to Dr. Matt Leavitt, not only a good friend, but the founder of Lumea. And we’re just so excited to have you on, Matt, and excited to kind of dive into your journey up to this point.
Matt Leavitt: Thank you, James. I am so excited to finally have this chance to do this. Yeah, you guys are doing great work there.
James Thackeray: Thank you. Well, it’s been fun and we’re, again, this is a unique opportunity for me to really dive deep with you in your journey. Let me give a little bit of background for you, Dr. Leavitt, and then we’ll dive into the history a little bit more and how you’ve kind of, how this journey has led you to this point.
So Dr. Leavitt did his med school at Dartmouth and then followed that with a residency and fellowship in surgical and hematopathology at Stanford. Dr. Leavitt was then the chair and department of pathology at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah. And then it gets really exciting. It’s at that point, you know, in 2013 that you founded Lumea, this digital pathology company. You went on to found another company, PathNet, that is a laboratory out doing great work built on the Lumea backbone. And you’ve also founded the DDx Foundation.
Tell us about when you really kind of recognized like digital pathology was gonna be something that you wanted to be a part of, you could see that it was gonna be something the industry would have to adopt at some point in time. Take us through the timeline of when you recognized that and then the kind of why and the what you did from there.
Matt Leavitt: Great, great question.
I… and it’s a question, I sometimes find myself asking myself, how did I end up here? So, let’s, go way back actually.
I knew that I wanted to be involved in leveraging digital technologies to improve care before I knew I wanted to be a pathologist.
So if you go back to my med school application in 1997, when I applied, back then, this makes me sound like a geezer. But the internet was new. You know, when we – we’re close to the same age, I think you’re younger than I am, at least you look a lot younger.
James Thackeray: Barely, barely.
Matt Leavitt: Anyway, the internet was new and the idea of being able to connect places to the world that had been previously disconnected meant a lot to me. So I grew up working on a ranch in rural Southern Utah. My mother’s earliest memory was actually in a tent on the mountain with sheep. So my grandfather, her dad, was a rancher. And so I grew up in a place that didn’t have a doctor in the whole county.
It was an hour away from the nearest physician assistant, let alone, there’s no pathology there. There aren’t even general practitioners there. And so the idea of being able to use telemedicine was what I wrote about on my med school application. So I wrote about my desire to connect those kinds of communities to high level care. And…
And so, but I had no idea what pathology was then. I pictured, you know, what we see, what we saw during the pandemic where, and what we see now in virtual care. That was kind of what I envisioned that meaning. When I got into medical school, I learned about pathology and how important it is for the patient’s journey. Not just in cancer, but in so many different things. And, uh..
And in the course of med school at Dartmouth, I started to blend those two things where, wow, what if we could start to take the kinds of amazing things that I could see in the path lab at Dartmouth to the remote areas. And at that point, it was like up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont or in the wild Northern New England.
And then, then of course I went to Stanford, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, very different experiences from rural med school to, you know, the tech boom was on at that point. And, and in the midst of the tech boom, as I’m practicing pathology, I’m like, oh, this is how this works. We’re going to, and the first digital scanners were coming out. And, and, you know, it was then that I started meeting some of the familiar faces that are still there in digital pathology.
So, you know, a classmate of mine was Andy Beck, who’s at Path AI. And the first sales rep who was a sales rep at Bacchus Labs, then was Amanda Lowe, who’s, you know, the whole industry knows these folks. Mohammed Salama, who was involved at TechSight in the early days of TechSight, was a classmate. All these folks were… were in those early days thinking, okay, this is gonna change everything. We’re not going to be practicing the same way we thought five years from now, 10 years from now. Okay, well, by the time I was done there, that was 2007. Now fast forward almost 20 years later, 20 years from the time that I first started seeing these scanners and the technology’s come very far.
You know, cloud technologies, computational technologies, the ability to handle those images has been there, has been around now. But I think it’s been frustrating for all of us as we’ve seen just the slowness of adoption. But you asked, your question was, when did I first know? It was way back then. And it never, that desire to use these new technologies to improve care in places that don’t receive care and for people who are cut off from care, that’s the basis for all of this. That’s the why. And so the why for this has never changed. Dang, I’m an emotional guy. So it’s not you, James.
James Thackeray: Yeah, this is great. It’s no, you’re a visionary and the why is the passion behind it and it’s exciting. It makes it what’s real about the whole thing.
Matt Leavitt: But the why has never changed. And so the why has been there for a long time and it’s still what drives me and it’s still what I’m excited about. And what, my career has taken a very different path. I never thought I’d be a pathologist. I never dreamed that I would leave my practice to start these companies. But if you look at my career, it’s sort of a three act play. My career after leaving Intermountain, Lumea is act one, PathNet is act two, and what I’m doing now is act three. And it’s all the same play. Again, the vision hasn’t changed, the purpose hasn’t changed, and what I’m trying to do hasn’t changed. It’s…
I’ve just learned more in each act. Hopefully we can cover some of that today.
James Thackeray: That’s great. Thank you for that background. It’s exciting. I mean, I’ve been a part of that journey, but just a snapshot of that, maybe between Act 1 and 2. I don’t know where, but it’s been exciting to watch. I was in the prologue, but I would say it’s your…
Matt Leavitt : You were in the prologue.
James Thackeray: I was in the prologue!
Matt Leavitt: You were, you were, you were in the… Yeah, yeah. You gotta, you gotta just say, we met each other. We were, we were competitors actually. I was, I was a he, I was doing hematopathology and he was selling for the competitor. And uh…
James Thackeray: That’s true. I think it sets you apart from maybe others out there where I think from the beginning, you’ve recognized – for digital pathology really to function well. It takes a lot of partnerships and it’s going to take some compromises from companies. It’s going to take some compromises from systems in general and the government. And all of these different and vastly different organizations that have to work together to make this work well.
So let me ask you this. Let’s go back to your first experience. So you’ve kind of set the stage for the why behind it. You’re out of Stanford. You’re working at Intermountain. And you start to see this. You’ve kind of seen this. But now, how are you really trying to implement it? Let’s talk a little bit about it. Your first experience trying to implement digital pathology.
Matt Leavitt: Yeah. So, so at the time, remember I’m just practicing pathology and we’re covering all those – we’re covering. My practice actually covered most of the state of Utah geographically and went down actually into Northern Arizona and, and, and some of the, the native American reservations. And, um, and, and, and so I was in a place where we were trying to figure out how do we improve care in those hospitals? We covered those hospitals and, um,
And the opportunity to start applying digital technologies to do that, we immediately started jumping into. So at Intermountain, we had early demonstrations with different scanner companies. And again, some of those people that I worked with in those early days at Intermountain are still working in the industry. And we’ve known each other now for two decades. It’s a long time in a field like this to know the same people. But we did early trials of the scanner at American Fork Hospital and we were using it to be able to get second opinions and trying to do some validation work there. And some of that work, Paul Urie, my partner there, presented at the, I think one of the first or one of the earliest Path Visions conferences.
Uh, what if I, you know, so I don’t know when path vision started, but I think it was 2008 when he, when he presented our work there and, um, and, and that early work sort of, uh, led us to like, okay, this is very doable. We can, we can validate this, uh, and, and, and we could see that that was doable. At the time we’d tried to convince the corporation, uh, to, uh, to invest in scanners and let’s, let’s do this. And, um,
And, you know, I was young and patient and very, and maybe overconfident. When they didn’t go that direction, I’m like, okay, well, we’re just going to do this. And so Dr. Szymanski and I, my colleague, plotted in the doctor’s lounge on a napkin, like, hey, we could put a scanner in this other lab and have a remote site and it’ll improve things. And so we convinced our wives to support us in essentially taking out what amounted to a second mortgage. It was about a quarter of a million dollars. We bought a 400 slide scanner and put it in another lab with a really, we thought was a genius business model. It was a terrible business model. We were just not, we had no idea what we were doing. They don’t train you on that in med school or residency. And we very quickly actually validated for several tissue types digital. So that would have been in 2012, 2013, I think it was 2012, we bought the scanner. And over time, you know, while we validated it, these were real, we started doing real cases. And we realized that we were actually just choosing to have the slides mailed to us, because it was faster just to use the bottom of the microscope. And so,
It was a very uncomfortable realization that like, okay, we just spent a quarter of a million dollars of our own money. Uh, our wives are forgoing, uh, things because we’re, we’re, uh, spending on this scanner that we’re not even using. It’s just gathering dust. And so our personal pain was actually the same experience that most, I think, academic hospitals were facing. It was like, hey, we bought this scanner, but it’s not really helpful for much. Um, but.
You know, when it’s your own money and it’s your own pain and, and, and, uh, I think maybe you think a little bit further, like, okay, well, what do we do now? And, and, um, we started asking ourselves why… this should work. You know, it’s not that you can’t diagnose with this. It’s not that it’s just what, what is it? And it was really the workflow, uh, was really inconvenient and, and it just wasn’t an efficient use of a pathologist’s time.
So we started, we started just saying, okay, well, what would it take? And we started thinking, well, what, what it would take is redesigning the entire workflow so that not only the workflow for the pathologists, which is what we were focused on at the time. That’s what most, most pathology, digital pathology companies have realized this and they’re developing workflows and, and image viewer platforms because they’ve come to the, that same realization, hey, it’s faster on a microscope. So you’re seeing that now in the industry where everyone’s creating this efficient workflow. We saw that back in 2013 and said, okay, well, how would we redo it? How would we redesign it? But because we were actually working with specimens that were coming from really remote places and trying to manage a lot of problems that are inherent to those kinds of distances…
We were also dealing with challenges in the standardization of the way specimens were handled. You’d get specimens that sat in Moab, Utah, where it’s 105 degrees and their quality was poor. And then suddenly you have to do an immunostain on that or try to make a decision on a patient’s HER2 status.
On a specimen that was sitting in the sun and assume, you know, we knew very well a lot of the data that led to standardization in breast cancer care was developed by Liz Hammond at Intermountain. And so we knew very well that there was a lack of standardization in our specimens that were coming to us.
And we realized, okay, there’s two revolutions happening here in our career. One is the digital revolution that we, you know, we’ve obviously believed that was coming because we went out and bought a scanner. The other was the one that we were in the middle of, which is the molecular revolution and molecular diagnostics. As a hematopathologist, I was working in that realm all the time. And, and so we made the connection that the thing that they both need is standardization of the pre-analytic.
If you can standardize the tissue. And if you can start to think about that early phase before the tissue gets to the lab, because the lab can try to standardize as much as you want. You know, we can time how long it takes from the time it hits the lab to the time that you get it in formalin. But what about the two days that it’s getting shipped from Moab or that it’s being, that’s outside the lab’s control. So, okay, if we’re going to think about this, let’s go all the way back to the patient.
If we’re going to rethink the workflow, let’s solve the standardization problem from the very beginning, from the time that the patient has the biopsy. And that led us to starting to work with engineers and people that had more expertise in these kinds of things than we did.
James Thackeray: That’s… you hit on a couple things I want to kind of vet out a little bit more the standardization piece because this is what visionaries do they tackle huge problems and maybe multiple problems like those are two different things right you’ve got the digital pathology, the evolution of that, how we set up the infrastructure for digital pathology, which is you were learning early that there needed to be an infrastructure.
I often compare, I don’t know if this is the right comparison, but I’m running this podcast so I can say it. But I think that like electric cars, you know that there is going to be a big part of the future. This is let’s go 10 years back, but the infrastructure wasn’t there. So you could see that it’s coming. You have consumers that want it. But the infrastructure hasn’t been built. And so it took the government’s involvement to help build the infrastructure and probably give the incentives that they needed to put out there to get kind of further adoption. And I feel like we’re in the same realm with digital pathology where everybody, I mean, even most pathologists at this point see that this is good for the future of pathology. It’s going to help to standardize some things from that point on.
But, the adoption is difficult because the infrastructure has to be built. And that’s the process. I think a lot of companies are going through right now is building that infrastructure. But then you’ve also tried to tackle and have successfully from what I can see done that in certain specialties, this standardization side of it. Can you like, it makes sense to me that a pathologist would be the one that can see that that needs to be standardized maybe more than anyone else because he or she is the one that ends up looking at the tissue and having to make major decisions on this, including downstream potential testing opportunities as well, right? So kind of walk us through that and what you’ve learned, because I think that’s unique to what your vision has been is bringing that standardization into this whole workflow.
Matt Leavitt: Yeah, there’s a lot there. I think one of the problems that we as a specialty have to deal with is – while subspecialization is wonderful, it also leads to silos. And you know, so much about that one thing and so if you can get that person who knows so much about that one thing, you’re going to get the best person for that thing. The problem is there’s limits to what each person can know and so that person may not know a lot of the other parts of the process. Pathology in general has forgotten histology.
We know it’s important, and people will probably contest that. I would have certainly contested that statement before I went on this journey. But not until I ran a histology lab and really got into the details of overseeing histology labs did I realize how much I didn’t know when the slides were just showing up on my desk and all, and my only interactions with the lab were to cut deeper levels or to order stains and to show up for lab week, you know, or a PR trip down to Southern Utah to make sure the specimens keep coming, you know, that, you know, the pathologists, maybe I’ll get a kick out of that. That’s often the level of interaction.
And the reality is the digital transformation of pathology is actually a digital transformation of histology.
And the pathologists are the ones who are getting the product of that.
But if you want to change that and make what the pathologist gets efficient and standard, you have to go backwards into places that most pathologists don’t spend a lot of time. And that really is in the histology lab. And so as we went…
As we went deeper into this, we realized that to get the efficiency gains that we wanted in the sign out process, you had to integrate seamlessly with everything upfront that we hadn’t even considered until we went down this, started going down this path with engineers and software developers and folks that, that, uh, that didn’t have all of the assumptions, they weren’t making the same assumptions that we were. And they asked questions that we were just assuming on and we started asking ourselves, oh yeah, that’s a good question. Why do we do that? Do we have to do it that way? And so it was really helpful to have non -pathologists helping us to redesign this workflow.
Because they asked questions, and specifically I’ll just call out Mark Evans, who’s a mechanical engineer and Andy Ivy, who’s a software developer, both are early co -founders in Lumia and still there. And those guys are the guys that started saying, well, why? Why do you do it that way? And do you have to do it that way?
Those are scary questions because yeah, well, because we’ve done it that way for 100 years, right? Are we really gonna question that? But they had the courage to do it and we were desperate enough to say, well, let’s try this, will this work? And so one of the early important elements was we realized we needed to standardize embedding.
If we could create standardization for embedding, it would help a lot of things for processing and embedding. And so we came across this small company and laboratory in Romania called Themis Pathology with Sorin Musat. And it was just a somebody on HistoNet, the histotechs who are listening to this will all know what I’m talking about. HistoNet is the secret society of histotechnologists on the internet. And it’s been around since the internet began. So like 1997, when I was talking at the beginning, when I was dreaming about telemedicine, the histotechs were all on the internet, like, you know, sharing secrets. And so one of my histotech friends on HistoNet saw this video with, you know, an amateur-produced video of a guy in Romania who was making tissue arrays on what’s called the biopsy chip. And because I happened to live in Romania for two years and spoke Romanian, I got excited enough. I called him up and got on a plane within a week or so and flew to Romania. And that was the, to make a long story short, we ended up becoming partners. And Dr. Musat and the Themis team who are all still there in Romania, it’s grown quite a bit and it’s a fabulous team that works inside the man now in standardizing embedding using this biopsy chip technology.
So that was a big, um, that was a big change that, that we realized would make a big difference, not just in the efficiency in the lab and in improving the way the tissue was handled, but it makes a huge difference in the workflow. And that’s really what we were focused on at the time was, yeah, it’s good to standardize the tissue handling, but what we’re focused on is just finding things that will make the workflow for the pathologist better.
James Thackeray: That’s great. I appreciate that. And that standardization piece is so crucial to your point. And we will talk, we can kind of get into that a little bit more, but it not only standardizes the way the tissue is handled from the time of the biopsy, which I think is, again, it’s not that there hasn’t been a standard, it just maybe hasn’t been ideal. And…
Already some of the internal feedback that we’ve gotten from molecular companies, for example, is the way that we’re now preserving tissue, at least in prostate, has more RNA for them to work with, has a lower QNS rate, and allows them to run more molecular assays, which in turn qualifies more patients for therapy downstream, which is… is really exciting to me when you get that kind of feedback because of the way you’re preserving the tissue from the very beginning.
Matt Leavitt: Yeah, yeah. Well, we decided to start with the specimen type that creates the most annoyance and was being handled probably in the worst ways that we could see in the community practices. And so we said, OK, if we can improve that, we’re going to be making a difference.
And so we focused our efforts with the biopsy chip on standardizing the processing and embedding for prostate, mostly because nobody in the hospital-based practices felt too bad about losing that. It had mostly gone off to commercial labs anyway, and so we wouldn’t be upsetting our colleagues. That was really why we chose it. And…
But it turned out to be a good one because it also was a part of the pathology economic system that was under strain. So because of the commercial labs that had focused on prostate biopsies and building businesses around that, Medicare kind of caught… caught on to that and said, okay, we’re going to target urology and we’re going to lower the reimbursement on that because people are making too much off prostate biopsies. That was tough for most of the industry, but it was actually very helpful to us because it created some shared pain in the industry that people realized, hey, I had a lab that was profitable before 2012.
Now we’re losing money because the reimbursements come down. We’ve got to find a solution.
James Thackeray: I think when we think about the standardization, the first half of it from the time of biopsy, I guess I’d like to connect that now to, you know, where most digital pathology platforms start, which is the time they get the slide.
So now you’ve done this pre-analytic work. You’ve changed the workflow, you’ve standardized it, you’ve brought in some efficiencies into the histology center, you’ve done some cool things in the way you’re preserving tissue. Walk me through now how that connects to what we started to talk about, which is digital pathology and how that kind of syncs together and maybe workflow, because you mentioned workflow with the pathologist. Like how does that tie together?
Matt Leavitt: Well, yeah, I’ll kind of answer that by sharing more of the story. And if I miss anything, come back to it. But when we started off, we just wanted to practice digitally. But then these technologies that were very, very different, like the chip, like the biopsy board, even all the digital tools and the workflow that we developed was different enough that we realized, hey, we might not just be an innovative practice, we might actually be a technology company. So like in 2018 or so, I didn’t know what we were. I didn’t know, are we a technology company that has a lab or are we a lab that has just really good technology chops? And, but then…
You know, around 2018, 2019, the lab just started to grow like crazy and was generating a lot of revenue and was disrupting the market substantially. The biopsy board was really driving a lot of that. And so as our volume started to go up, we started to get some calls from some of the molecular companies like Myriad. It’s like, you know, your slides look weird.
Uh, you know, they’re different than others. You know, can we do our testing? And so we started developing relationships with some of the molecular companies to make sure that, uh, that what we had done for workflow for the pathologist convenience and for the efficiency of the digital workflow. We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t messing up the molecular testing. Remember that was something that was important to me as a hematopathologist. I was aware that that might be the case. Uh, when we validated it, we simply showed, hey, it’s just as good on the morphology. But we hadn’t done the complete molecular validation. So we worked with a couple of those companies to make sure that they were not getting worse QNS rates. We just wanted to make sure it wasn’t worse.
But to our surprise, some of the technologies we developed drastically reduced the QNS rates.
And so we started looking at it by day, specimens that were drawn on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and not unexpectedly, and this is from dozens of clinics now. And we had no control over what days they drew those specimens, but we wanted to see, are you seeing a difference in the nucleic acid quality depending on the day? And that has already been shown in different labs that we wanted to verify and get a baseline for what was happening in ours. And it turns out we were getting like 10% rejections on those specimens that were on Thursday and Friday because they were often sitting over the weekend before it got processed in the lab. And interestingly, when we changed to the biopsy board, that QNS rate on Thursday, Friday was gone.
It went down to, you know, I think around 1%. And it didn’t have any relationship at that point to the day of the week. And so we thought, oh, wow, we’ve stumbled onto a better way to preserve specimens. That’s a big deal.
James Thackeray: Yeah, huge.
Matt Leavitt: If you can preserve specimens in a reliable way. And it does, and you don’t, and you no longer have to try to figure out which day of the week the patients have their biopsies on. That’s a big deal. And, and, and the cool thing was it was easier for the urologists and for the clinicians. And it was better, which, you know, that doesn’t happen very often, which is, yeah. So we were really excited about it.
We designed this system to make life easier for the pathologists, but it turns out the process of specimen preservation was just better. And, and, and even within the company, we had all kinds of intense debates because we’ve got researchers, we’ve got a whole research team in Romania that’s saying, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, that can’t be the case because you have to have 10 times the volume of formalin to the volume of the specimen. And I grew up with that as the dogma and every pathologist or lab tech will say, yeah, you got to have 10 times the formalin and 10 times the volume of the specimen. And so these were internal debates like, hey, this defies that. And so we had to methodically prove it to ourselves that whatever it was with this tissue preservation process, did it really?
Was it reliable and was it more than just for prostate biopsies? And it is. And so that, again, I wish I could say we were smart enough to say we saw this a mile away. We didn’t. We were just trying to make life easier for the pathologist. And it turns out that the process that and methods that we created to do that happened to preserve specimens a lot better than jars of formalin.
And so that’s how we got there.
As excited as I am about all the cool things that Lumea has done to democratize digital pathology, and mostly in urology, I’m actually more excited about applying the things we learned there on standardization in specimen handling to these other areas like lung, like… uh, you know, like, uh, breast, like colon where there’s where, where the targeted therapies are there. And, and, and the need to be able to standardize the pre-analytics is so high. We haven’t done that because we’re mostly involved in these community practices today. But what we’ve done at Lumea, uh, was prove a concept. I’m excited where you’re headed next.
And this is the basis for it, but I’m really excited.
James Thackeray: How about in kind of this last little bit, just speak to us around the state of digital pathology and optimism. I know you’re naturally an optimistic person. It’s a challenging industry. We talked about, you know, the infrastructure that it takes. Bringing in this pre-analytic piece helps because you’re standardizing things, but you’re also creating workflow efficiencies, but talk to us about where you see digital pathology going. Are you happy with the journey that it’s taking or just kind of give us your thoughts there.
Matt Leavitt: Well, with everyone else in this field, I sure wish it would move faster.
James Thackeray: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Leavitt: You know, I think we all share that pain. But I’m very optimistic. I am.
I’ve never doubted that the field will go here. I’ve been surprised how long it’s taking, but I see us going there. It’s not a matter of if, if digital pathology is going to happen. It’s a matter of how and how long is it going to take and how are we going to do it? I understand the challenges now a lot better than I did 10 years ago.
Um, the economic realities, I understand a lot better, uh, as I’ve gotten, uh, and I’ve been in the middle of it. Uh, one of the important realizations that we had that I think the field is going to have to recognize is that, well, you hear this over and over again, when you go to conferences and that is there’s no ROI in going digital. And I don’t think that technology, at least scanners and the technology that we think of today, I don’t think that’s going to change the economics of that. Because I think to do digital well adds cost. And so.
If you plan to go digital anytime in the next 5 to 10 years and you don’t have a high volume, it’s just not going to make sense to do that, to go out and buy a scanner and add the additional cost. Unless you can do it as part of a cooperative. So, you know, this happens all the time as industries evolve. New technologies require expenses that small players can’t afford – it happened in farming, happens in everything.
And so the answer, if you’re in a small lab or in a small clinic and you want to be at the cutting edge and go digital, you have to find a way to share the costs of that with others. And so that’s what we learned at PathNet. We took a lot of small labs that had no business going digital and connected them into a hub that served all of them, sort of in a cooperative type model. And that improved the economics of everybody who was part of it. And so that was an important insight. And what does it lead to? Instead of 20 labs that all do it slightly differently, it creates standardization. So by just leveraging collectively by small hospitals and small labs working together in their communities to invest in digital as a community, it enables that community to standardize.
So that’s why I’m doing the Foundation now, is to try to get labs to work together to alleviate some common pain and to give them the ability to go digital when it probably doesn’t make financial sense for them to do it in any other way.
James Thackeray: That’s great. That’s a great summary. And it kind of really hits back to your, I think, innovative vision. It’s just one more way that you have to be creative in a very challenging industry, where you have economic and infrastructure challenges. We work to try to resolve those on our own there, or collectively there.
But if you’re not being creative, like the pre-analytic things, how do we standardize this way and bring ROI into that piece of it so that you can justify going digital? And then to this, like a co-op potential so that more can have that opportunity to participate in this. That’s what I think gets me excited about. Your vision has always gotten me excited about it is… taking what we have and then trying to be creative and innovative and furthering it through that innovation. And I think it’s playing out in front of our eyes.
Believe me, I know firsthand how busy you are.
Thank you for being on the podcast, but thank you for a vision that I think a lot of us have been following now for some time. We’re excited to have you back and further the conversation.
Matt Leavitt: Yeah, thanks. I look forward to it. All right.
James Thackeray: Okay, thank you.
