Source BioScience has signed a three-year contract with the Swedish medical imaging company Sectra to roll out a cloud-based system for sharing digital pathology cases across the NHS. The deal, announced on 21 September, will allow hospital laboratories to send complex cases to external specialists electronically rather than through the physical transport of glass slides, a method that has remained standard practice in much of the health service despite years of digital investment elsewhere in diagnostics.

The agreement covers deployment of an upgraded version of the Sectra Image Exchange Portal, known as Sectra IEP, which the company says has undergone substantial modernisation to support workflows beyond its traditional base in radiology. The platform is a cloud-based, vendor-neutral system for exchanging and collaborating around medical images already used by more than 500 institutions, mainly in radiology. The contract with Source BioScience marks its first customer in pathology specifically, according to the companies.

Volumes are expected to build steadily rather than arrive all at once. Up to 60,000 cases are expected to move through the platform in the first year, with volumes scaling up in subsequent years. The contract was signed in the second quarter of Sectra's 2026/2027 fiscal year, the company confirmed.

The problem the deal is aimed at is a familiar one in NHS diagnostics. Caseloads have been rising for years while the number of consultant histopathologists available to report on them has not kept pace, and growing subspecialisation means the right expert for a given case is often based at a different trust altogether. Under the current system, sending that work elsewhere usually depends on informal, laboratory-to-laboratory arrangements, with samples physically couriered between sites. That process is slow by nature and creates extra administrative work on both ends of the referral, for the laboratory sending the case and the one receiving it.

Nick Bills, healthcare director at Source BioScience, framed the new arrangement as a way of closing that gap. He said the integration would give the NHS "a seamless digital pathway to external specialists, with diagnoses delivered straight back into its own records", which he argued would ease pressure on turnaround times, consultant shortages and reporting backlogs simultaneously. Source BioScience already supports a substantial share of NHS pathology work: its histopathology and genomics services cover more than 85 NHS trusts and a number of private clinics, delivered out of laboratories in Nottingham, Chichester and Cambridge.

For Sectra, the deal extends a network built up over more than a decade of radiology image-sharing into a new clinical area. Jane Rendall, the company's managing director for the UK and Ireland, described the Image Exchange Portal as the underlying infrastructure for image sharing across the NHS, and said the update was designed to let cases and completed reports move between organisations as easily as they currently move within one. The ambition, in her words, is an NHS where specialist expertise is not confined by which trust happens to employ the right pathologist.

That ambition points to something larger than a single commercial contract. Radiology has had a national image-sharing network for years, allowing scans to move between hospitals with relative ease. Pathology has lagged behind, still largely dependent on physical samples and one-off arrangements between labs. Extending the same infrastructure into pathology, if it works as intended, would give trusts a standing mechanism for cross-organisational referral rather than a patchwork of ad hoc deals, and lay groundwork for a more formal telepathology network across England.

Whether that translates into shorter waiting times for patients will depend on how quickly trusts adopt the system and how consistently the promised volumes materialise. For now, the agreement represents one part of a broader push, involving several vendors and NHS bodies, to bring pathology into line with the digital workflows that have already reshaped much of diagnostic radiology.

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