After 13 years of making the case for digital pathology, Lumea’s Chief Revenue Officer, Chelsea Sowards, believes the market is finally ready to move. Metric Bio’s Will Booth, who leads MedTech digital pathology search, sat down with her to find out what is driving adoption, how buying decisions are changing and what separates the commercial leaders who will define the next phase.
Her view is direct. Momentum is building, most labs are still not digital, and she expects mass adoption within the next 12 to 18 months.
Momentum is building, but most labs are not there yet
At a recent lab directors’ summit Chelsea attended, covering everything from rural to large US hospitals, she estimates that only about 10% had implemented digital pathology. The awareness is there.
“Everyone knows they have to go digital,” she says.
What has changed is the ask. Labs now want infrastructure that scales across the whole operation, not one-off small use cases. That shapes how Lumea goes to market. Its pitch is to take the entire daily caseload digital rather than a narrow slice of it.
Skip the pilot
The conventional route into digital pathology is a pilot. Chelsea’s experience is that pilots with partial buy-in rarely succeed, because the stakeholders who never signed off surface later with different goals.
Her alternative is to get every stakeholder aligned from the start. The conversation begins with two questions. What is your goal, and by when do you want to be digital? From there, Lumea skips the pilot and goes straight to full implementation.
Contracts are structured so that customers never feel trapped, because the technology is changing quickly. Chelsea is equally clear that one model does not fit everyone. “Every lab is different,” she says, and outsiders who push standardization misunderstand how pathology works.
Labs have stopped waiting for reimbursement
Will asked how the buying journey has evolved over the last two years, Chelsea frames the change as less about buyers and more about the industry itself, which is still working out how to price software.
On the buyer side, intent sets the pace. Labs with an internal digital project move from first discussion to contract much faster, while groups that are interested but unsure still take a long time. One shift stands out in the US. Labs have stopped waiting for reimbursement. They are making digital fit their budgets without counting on a reimbursement uptick.
The decision itself sits with two groups. Pathology and the C-suite both matter, with the CFO and the wider C-suite driving the call on cost. Pathologist buy-in has to be secured from the start, because without it go-live stalls and pathologists are slow to begin signing out cases.
Beat the customer’s timeline
Customers are asking for much shorter timelines. Chelsea gives an example of a request to be digital in six weeks, and says her team has delivered against it.
Her rule is to beat the customer’s timeline while their excitement is high. If integration drags out to four months, momentum fizzles. That makes client success, the team that handles onboarding and implementation, vital to the commercial model alongside sales.
What great commercial leadership looks like
Sales and client success teams are the two capabilities Chelsea values most in her team. Selling into labs is its own discipline, and experience of selling to labs in general does not automatically translate.
She is open on background. She is not looking for urology experience specifically, because she wants fresh perspectives, and she has hired straight from labs as well as lab sales directors. Lab business development and internal roles at large labs work well.
What predicts the success of a commercial leader is the understanding of billing, compliance and regulation, including how pathologists are paid, whether they are employed or contracted, and which rules apply to each. It also takes a clear understanding of pathologist pain points, a startup mentality with the willingness to wear several hats, and genuine belief in the product. “You have to believe in the product you’re selling to be optimistic about it.”
The breadth of the platform makes that last point matter. Lumea covers grossing and molecular test ordering as well as slides, so the starting point should always be the customer’s problem.
What we are seeing at Metric Bio
Alongside Chelsea’s view, Metric Bio is seeing a clear shift in how vendors build their commercial teams. Vendors are increasingly hiring pathologists into strategic roles, and US entrants are building customer success, go-live, integration and digital project management teams ahead of scale.
It also matches what we see in commercial hiring. We screen candidates on whether they genuinely want autonomy and are ready for the trade-offs that come with it, and we ask each one for their “why”, the motivation that sits beyond the numbers.
Where Lumea goes next
Lumea’s commercial priorities for the next 12 months follow the demand for infrastructure that scales. The first is to grow the image management system (IMS) brand so that Lumea is seen as a major player rather than a niche urology product. The second is to expand in urology, including into hospital systems.
“It’s about to get real fun”
Looking to 2028, Chelsea expects mass adoption in the next 12 to 18 months, based on what she heard at the summit. After 13 years of saying digital pathology was coming, it is happening.
“It’s about to get real fun,” she says.
The test for smaller companies will be building to scale and onboarding at volume while staying a flexible, nimble partner.
Her advice to commercial leaders building a career in the field is short. “Buckle up.” It is a rollercoaster, and you are either cut out for it or you are not. Stay optimistic, know where the industry is heading, and keep the focus on the impact for patients. A speaker at the summit describing their own lab’s digital transformation showed her the promises becoming reality.
Digital Pathology Debrief tracks the deals, launches and commercial moves shaping digital pathology and AI diagnostics, with market intelligence from Metric Bio. To discuss the market, speak to Will Booth. Subscribe at https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/digital-pathology-debrief-7494003242876624897/.
