Department of Pathology

The Florida Digestive Health Specialists Pathology Department is a state-of-the-art facility serving our care centers and research facilities throughout Florida. Our team includes licensed histologists, technologists, and three board-certified pathologists with a subspecialty in Gastrointestinal Pathology.

Our highly skilled pathologists regularly communicate with our care centers to ensure the immediate reporting of clinically significant information. The pathology department’s centralized location helps us deliver fast, accurate results to meet the needs of our many physicians and patients. Our lab is accredited by Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) and the College of American Pathologists, the world’s leading organization of board-certified pathologists that administers one of the most stringent certification processes in the nation.

Pathology is the branch of medicine concerned with the cause, origin, and nature of a disease and its associated processes. Pathologists use a microscope to examine tissue removed from a patient and processed by a histologist. Our pathologists evaluate the tissue morphologically and, with modern technology (special stains, immunohistochemistry, fluorescent in situ hybridization, and more), render diagnoses that our gastroenterologists use further to guide them in the treatment plan for the patient.

Histology determines how tissues are organized at all structural levels, from cells to intercellular substances to organs. Our histologists’ primary goal is to take the specimen through levels of processing to create microscopic slides for the pathologist to review. The pathologist will then render a diagnosis from the slides presented by the histologist team.