Limited budgets are often a reason to choose for general, commercial displays. Because yes, at the moment of buying, a medical display is usually costlier. However, it’s important to look beyond that moment, because the lower-priced solution isn’t always the most cost-effective, nor the most reliable. What makes medical displays better suited for your work in whole slide imaging?
Know that with qualitative, medical displays, you won’t need to reinvest in new ones for many more years to come than with most consumer displays. For management, it means that display investments don’t need to be added to the budget every two or three years, but at a much lower frequency – for example, only every five or seven years. So even though medical displays might be more expensive at the moment of buying, far less frequent replacements lower the cost in the longer term.
Displays in medical environments are generally used intensively. Not every display is made to stand operation for hours on end, every day. Many medical displays are built for intensive use during a long period of time. A good indicator of this is their warranty. You won’t find a lot of consumer displays whose warranty period runs longer than three years, right? A lot of medical displays contain technologies that track their performance non-stop.
When you use a monitor at home to read your email or check your social media, you’re using it simply for its ability to display content. If your monitor is a few years old and the colors a bit faded, you won’t misinterpret your email.
When you’re analyzing slides (or any kind of medical image, for that matter), you don’t rely on the display to just show you the images. You also rely on it to show them to you correctly. Sensors and stabilization technology make sure that luminance remains stable, and that images are always shown consistently as the display ages.
In stained pathology slides, you’ll find an enormously wide range of pinks, purples and browns, whereas greens, for instance, are much less common and blacks as good as nonexistent. So instead of choosing a display that shows all colors in medium quality, you can also opt for a display that is specialized in a pathology-centered range of colors. And that’s just one of the ways in which a display can be produced to suit certain specialties.
Lastly, medical displays need to earn the term ‘medical’. Many regions have regulations in place to control what is being marketed and sold for use in healthcare, in order to make sure that the quality is good enough. The American Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission, for example, determine which displays and other equipment can be defined as ‘medical device’.
The most important thing is to be critical. Some good research can do wonders for your team’s work and productivity during the coming years.
