Informatics

Informatics is the management of information.

Pathologists, unfortunately, only have abysmal tools for this job.

The two main clinical information systems (Softpath and CoPath) are pathetic and look like they are out of the early 1990s.

Software in use at pathology departments

Softpath - in one word: awful. It is hard to believe people buy licenses for this.
CoPath - considered state-of-the-art... as it sucks less than the competition.
MEDITECH - worse than Softpath.

Wiki use for the dissemination of pathology knowledge is increasing.
In the general sphere, Wikipedia is dominating a will probably continue to do so.^[1]

Open source in pathology appears to be some way off. One paper,^[2] gives me a bit of hope -- though I think this is a voice in the wilderness.

The radiologists are more on the ball here, e.g. UCLA's OpenSourcePACS.^[3] A few institutions (mostly American) are coming to understand this and have formed the Open Digital Pathology Consortium.

↑ Heilman, JM.; Kemmann, E.; Bonert, M.; Chatterjee, A.; Ragar, B.; Beards, GM.; Iberri, DJ.; Harvey, M. et al. (2011). "Wikipedia: a key tool for global public health promotion.". J Med Internet Res 13 (1): e14. doi:10.2196/jmir.1589. PMID 21282098.
↑ Rubin A (December 2004). "An open pathology computer system". J. Clin. Pathol. 57 (12): 1252–3. doi:10.1136/jcp.2004.020826. PMC 1770514. PMID 15563662. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1770514/.
↑ Bui, AA.; Morioka, C.; Dionisio, JD.; Johnson, DB.; Sinha, U.; Ardekani, S.; Taira, RK.; Aberle, DR. et al. (Jan 2007). "OpenSourcePACS: an extensible infrastructure for medical image management.". IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 11 (1): 94-109. PMID 17249408.