Three-year agreement uses the Sectra Image Exchange Portal to digitally route up to 60,000 pathology cases in its first year.
Source BioScience UK Ltd has entered into a three-year agreement with medical imaging IT company Sectra to implement an advanced workflow service connecting National Health Service (NHS) organizations with external specialist pathologists, according to a press release from Sectra.
Under the contract, signed in the second quarter of Sectra’s 2026/2027 fiscal year, the deployment will utilize the Sectra Image Exchange Portal (IEP) to handle up to 60,000 digital pathology cases during the first year, with plans to scale in subsequent years. Source BioScience is the first Sectra customer to deploy this workflow domain, which aims to establish national telepathology networks in the UK and broaden access to specialized reporting capacity, according to the companies.
“This milestone integration will give the NHS a seamless digital pathway to external specialists, with diagnoses delivered straight back into its own records – reducing turnaround times, easing consultant shortages and tackling reporting backlogs,” says Nick Bills, healthcare director at Source BioScience, in a release.
Addressing Consultant Shortages and Workflow Bottlenecks
Source BioScience provides histopathology and genomics services to more than 85 NHS trusts and private healthcare clinics, operating histopathology facilities in Nottingham, Chichester, and Cambridge, the company reported.
Currently, NHS pathology departments face mounting case volumes alongside a limited number of reporting consultant pathologists, according to the release. Additionally, increasing subspecialization often requires laboratories to refer cases to pathologists situated at external institutions.
Sending diagnostic work to third-party capacity providers has historically relied on bespoke arrangements between individual laboratories, often requiring the transport of physical glass slides, Sectra noted. These conventional processes slow turnaround times, increase administrative burdens, and create operational inefficiencies for both sending and receiving laboratory teams, according to the company.
Expanding Digital Workflows Beyond Radiology
Under the modernized Sectra IEP platform, a laboratory can create a case as a job directly from its existing worklist, delegate that job to a receiving organization, and have the completed diagnostic report delivered directly back into the referring facility’s electronic records, according to the announcement.
While the cloud-based, vendor-neutral portal is already utilized by more than 500 institutions primarily for radiology image sharing, recent platform updates allow healthcare facilities to move beyond image exchange to manage cross-organizational clinical workflows within pathology, Sectra stated.
“IEP is the backbone of image sharing across the NHS. With our modernized platform, we are introducing advanced workflows between healthcare organizsations, and extending that trusted national network into pathology. Connecting trusts directly with external specialists like Source BioScience means cases and completed reports move seamlessly across organizational boundaries. It is a step towards an NHS where expertise is always within reach, and where work moves between organizations as easily as it moves within them,” says Jane Rendall, managing director for Sectra UK and Ireland, in a release.
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