A Framework for Integrating Telehealth Equitably across the cancer care continuum.

The COVID-19 pandemic placed a spotlight on the potential to dramatically increase the use of telehealth across the cancer care continuum, but whether and how telehealth can be implemented in practice in ways that reduce, rather than exacerbate, inequities are largely unknown. To help fill this critical gap in research and practice, we developed the Framework for Integrating Telehealth Equitably (FITE), a process and evaluation model designed to help guide equitable integration of telehealth into practice. In this manuscript, we present FITE and showcase how investigators across the National Cancer Institute's Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence are applying the framework in different ways to advance digital and health equity. By highlighting multilevel determinants of digital equity that span further than access alone, FITE highlights the complex and differential ways structural determinants restrict or enable digital equity at the individual and community level. As such, achieving digital equity will require strategies designed to not only support individual behavior but also change the broader context to ensure all patients and communities have the choice, opportunity, and resources to use telehealth across the cancer care continuum.

University of Pennsylvania Telehealth Research Center of Excellence.

Drawing from insights from communication science and behavioral economics, the University of Pennsylvania Telehealth Research Center of Excellence (Penn TRACE) is designing and testing telehealth strategies with the potential to transform access to care, care quality, outcomes, health equity, and health-care efficiency across the cancer care continuum, with an emphasis on understanding mechanisms of action. Penn TRACE uses lung cancer care as an exemplar model for telehealth across the care continuum, from screening to treatment to survivorship. We bring together a diverse and interdisciplinary team of international experts and incorporate rapid-cycle approaches and mixed methods evaluation in all center projects. Our initiatives include a pragmatic sequential multiple assignment randomized trial to compare the effectiveness of telehealth strategies to increase shared decision-making for lung cancer screening and 2 pilot projects to test the effectiveness of telehealth to improve cancer care, identify multilevel mechanisms of action, and lay the foundation for future pragmatic trials. Penn TRACE aims to produce new fundamental knowledge and advance telehealth science in cancer care at Penn and nationally.

Rates of Downstream Procedures and Complications Associated With Lung Cancer Screening in Routine Clinical Practice : A Retrospective Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer screening (LCS) using low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces lung cancer mortality but can lead to downstream procedures, complications, and other potential harms. Estimates of these events outside NLST (National Lung Screening Trial) have been variable and lacked evaluation by screening result, which allows more direct comparison with trials. OBJECTIVE: To identify rates of downstream procedures and complications associated with LCS. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: 5 U.S. health care systems. PATIENTS: Individuals who completed a baseline LDCT scan for LCS between 2014 and 2018. MEASUREMENTS: Outcomes included downstream imaging, invasive diagnostic procedures, and procedural complications. For each, absolute rates were calculated overall and stratified by screening result and by lung cancer detection, and positive and negative predictive values were calculated. RESULTS: Among the 9266 screened patients, 1472 (15.9%) had a baseline LDCT scan showing abnormalities, of whom 140 (9.5%) were diagnosed with lung cancer within 12 months (positive predictive value, 9.5% [95% CI, 8.0% to 11.0%]; negative predictive value, 99.8% [CI, 99.7% to 99.9%]; sensitivity, 92.7% [CI, 88.6% to 96.9%]; specificity, 84.4% [CI, 83.7% to 85.2%]). Absolute rates of downstream imaging and invasive procedures in screened patients were 31.9% and 2.8%, respectively. In patients undergoing invasive procedures after abnormal findings, complication rates were substantially higher than those in NLST (30.6% vs. 17.7% for any complication; 20.6% vs. 9.4% for major complications). LIMITATION: Assessment of outcomes was retrospective and was based on procedural coding. CONCLUSION: The results indicate substantially higher rates of downstream procedures and complications associated with LCS in practice than observed in NLST. Diagnostic management likely needs to be assessed and improved to ensure that screening benefits outweigh potential harms. PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE: National Cancer Institute and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The Philadelphia Lung Cancer Learning Community: a multi-health-system, citywide approach to lung cancer screening.

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer screening uptake for individuals at high risk is generally low across the United States, and reporting of lung cancer screening practices and outcomes is often limited to single hospitals or institutions. We describe a citywide, multicenter analysis of individuals receiving lung cancer screening integrated with geospatial analyses of neighborhood-level lung cancer risk factors. METHODS: The Philadelphia Lung Cancer Learning Community consists of lung cancer screening clinicians and researchers at the 3 largest health systems in the city. This multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team identified a Philadelphia Lung Cancer Learning Community study cohort that included 11 222 Philadelphia residents who underwent low-dose computed tomography for lung cancer screening from 2014 to 2021 at a Philadelphia Lung Cancer Learning Community health-care system. Individual-level demographic and clinical data were obtained, and lung cancer screening participants were geocoded to their Philadelphia census tract of residence. Neighborhood characteristics were integrated with lung cancer screening counts to generate bivariate choropleth maps. RESULTS: The combined sample included 37.8% Black adults, 52.4% women, and 56.3% adults who currently smoke. Of 376 residential census tracts in Philadelphia, 358 (95.2%) included 5 or more individuals undergoing lung cancer screening, and the highest counts were geographically clustered around each health system's screening sites. A relatively low percentage of screened adults resided in census tracts with high tobacco retailer density or high smoking prevalence. CONCLUSIONS: The sociodemographic characteristics of lung cancer screening participants in Philadelphia varied by health system and neighborhood. These results suggest that a multicenter approach to lung cancer screening can identify vulnerable areas for future tailored approaches to improving lung cancer screening uptake. Future directions should use these findings to develop and test collaborative strategies to increase lung cancer screening at the community and regional levels.

Application of team science best practices to the project management of a large, multi-site lung cancer screening research consortium.

Research is increasingly conducted through multi-institutional consortia, and best practices for establishing multi-site research collaborations must be employed to ensure efficient, effective, and productive translational research teams. In this manuscript, we describe how the Population-based Research to Optimize the Screening Process Lung Research Center (PROSPR-Lung) utilized evidence-based Science of Team Science (SciTS) best practices to establish the consortium's infrastructure and processes to promote translational research in lung cancer screening. We provide specific, actionable examples of how we: (1) developed and reinforced a shared mission, vision, and goals; (2) maintained a transparent and representative leadership structure; (3) employed strong research support systems; (4) provided efficient and effective data management; (5) promoted interdisciplinary conversations; and (6) built a culture of trust. We offer guidance for managing a multi-site research center and data repository that may be applied to a variety of settings. Finally, we detail specific project management tools and processes used to drive collaboration, efficiency, and scientific productivity.

Radiomic phenotyping of the lung parenchyma in a lung cancer screening cohort.

High-throughput extraction of radiomic features from low-dose CT scans can characterize the heterogeneity of the lung parenchyma and potentially aid in identifying subpopulations that may have higher risk of lung diseases, such as COPD, and lung cancer due to inflammation or obstruction of the airways. We aim to determine the feasibility of a lung radiomics phenotyping approach in a lung cancer screening cohort, while quantifying the effect of different CT reconstruction algorithms on phenotype robustness. We identified low-dose CT scans (n = 308) acquired with Siemens Healthineers scanners from patients who completed low-dose CT within our lung cancer screening program between 2015 and 2018 and had two different sets of image reconstructions kernel available (i.e., medium (I30f.), sharp (I50f.)) for the same acquisition. Following segmentation of the lung field, a total of 26 radiomic features were extracted from the entire 3D lung-field using a previously validated fully-automated lattice-based software pipeline, adapted for low-dose CT scans. The lattice in-house software was used to extract features including gray-level histogram, co-occurrence, and run-length descriptors. The lattice approach uses non-overlapping windows for traversing along pixels of images and calculates different features. Each feature was averaged for each scan within a range of lattice window sizes (W) of 4, 8 and 20 mm. The extracted imaging features from both datasets were harmonized to correct for differences in image acquisition parameters. Subsequently, unsupervised hierarchical clustering was applied on the extracted features to identify distinct phenotypic patterns of the lung parenchyma, where consensus clustering was used to identify the optimal number of clusters (K = 2). Differences between phenotypes for demographic and clinical covariates including sex, age, BMI, pack-years of smoking, Lung-RADS and cancer diagnosis were assessed for each phenotype cluster, and then compared across clusters for the two different CT reconstruction algorithms using the cluster entanglement metric, where a lower entanglement coefficient corresponds to good cluster alignment. Furthermore, an independent set of low-dose CT scans (n = 88) from patients with available pulmonary function data on lung obstruction were analyzed using the identified optimal clusters to assess associations to lung obstruction and validate the lung phenotyping paradigm. Heatmaps generated by radiomic features identified two distinct lung parenchymal phenotype patterns across different feature extraction window sizes, for both reconstruction algorithms (P < 0.05 with K = 2). Associations of radiomic-based clusters with clinical covariates showed significant differences for BMI and pack-years of smoking (P < 0.05) for both reconstruction kernels. Radiomic phenotype patterns were more similar across the two reconstructed kernels, when smaller window sizes (W = 4 and 8 mm) were used for radiomic feature extraction, as deemed by their entanglement coefficient. Validation of clustering approaches using cluster mapping for the independent sample with lung obstruction also showed two statistically significant phenotypes (P < 0.05) with significant difference for BMI and smoking pack-years. Radiomic analysis can be used to characterize lung parenchymal phenotypes from low-dose CT scans, which appear reproducible for different reconstruction kernels. Further work should seek to evaluate the effect of additional CT acquisition parameters and validate these phenotypes in characterizing lung cancer screening populations, to potentially better stratify disease patterns and cancer risk.

Patient perspectives on delays in cervical cancer screening and follow-up care in Botswana: a mixed methods study.

BACKGROUND: Delays in screening and timely diagnosis contribute significantly to global disparities in cervical cancer mortality in Botswana and other low- and middle-income countries, particularly those with high rates of HIV. Little is known about the modifiable factors shaping these delays from the perspectives of women themselves and how these perspectives may differ between those living with and without HIV. METHODS: From March-May 2019, we conducted a concurrent, mixed methods study of women receiving treatment for cervical cancer at a multidisciplinary oncology clinic in Botswana. Enrolled participants completed a one-time, concurrent semi-structured interview and structured questionnaire assessing patient characteristics, screening and HIV-related beliefs and knowledge, and barriers and facilitators to screening and follow-up care. Qualitative data were analyzed using directed content analysis guided by the Model of Pathways to Treatment and triangulated with quantitative questionnaire data to identify areas of convergence and divergence. Fisher's exact tests were used to explore associations between questionnaire data (e.g., screening knowledge) and HIV status. RESULTS: Forty-two women enrolled in the study, 64% of whom were living with HIV and 26% were diagnosed with stage III cervical cancer. Median age was 45 years (IQR 54-67) in those living with HIV and 64 years (IQR 42-53) in those living without. Overall screening rates before symptomatic disease were low (24%). Median time from most proximal screen to diagnosis was 52 median days (IQR 15-176), with no significant differences by HIV status. General screening knowledge was higher among those living with HIV versus those without (100% vs 73%; p < 0.05), but knowledge about HPV and other risk factors was low in both groups. Similar to questionnaire results, qualitative results indicate limited awareness of the need to be screened prior to symptoms as a central barrier to timely screening. Some participants also noted that delays in the receipt of screening results and fear also contributed to treatment delays. However, many participants also described myriad sources of social and tangible support that helped them to overcome some of these challenges. CONCLUSION: Interventions focused on increasing routine screening and supporting timely awareness and access to care are needed to reduce global disparities in cervical cancer.

Exploring Why Financial Incentives Fail to Affect At-home Colorectal Cancer Screening: a Mixed Methods Study.

BACKGROUND: Despite success in increasing other health behaviors, financial incentives have shown limited to no effect on colorectal cancer (CRC screening. Little is known about the factors shaping why and for whom incentives improve screening. OBJECTIVE: To explore the perspective of participants enrolled in a larger, four-arm pragmatic trial at urban family medicine practices which assessed and failed to detect significant effects of financial incentives on at-home CRC screening completion. DESIGN: We performed a mixed methods study with a subset of randomly selected patients, stratified by study arm, following completion of the pragmatic trial. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty patients (46.9% enrollment rate) who were eligible and overdue for colorectal cancer screening at the time of trial enrollment and who continued to receive care at family medicine practices affiliated with an urban academic health system completed the interview and questionnaire. MAIN MEASURES: Using Andersen's behavioral model, a semi-structured interview guide assessed motivators, barriers, and facilitators to screening completion and the impact of incentives on decision-making. Participants also completed a brief questionnaire evaluating demographics, screening beliefs, and clinical characteristics. KEY RESULTS: The majority of patients (n = 49; 82%) reported that incentives would not change their decision to complete or not complete CRC screening, which was confirmed by qualitative data as largely due to high perceived health benefits. Those who stated financial incentives would impact their decision (n = 11) were significantly less likely to agree that CRC screening is beneficial (72.7% vs 95.9%; p < 0.05) or that CRC could be cured if detected early (63.6% vs 98.0%; p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Financial incentives are likely not an effective behavioral intervention to increase CRC screening for all but may be powerful for increasing short-term benefit and therefore completion for some. Targeting financial incentive interventions according to patient screening beliefs may prove a cost-effective strategy in primary care outreach programs to increase CRC screening.

Persistent Barriers to Colorectal Cancer Screening Completion Amid Centralized Outreach: A Mixed Methods Study.

PURPOSE: To understand patient experiences and persistent barriers to colorectal cancer (CRC) screening amid centralized outreach at urban family medicine practices. APPROACH: Following a pragmatic trial assessing mailed fecal immunochemical test (FIT) outreach, we invited a subset of participants to complete a semi-structured qualitative interview and structured questionnaire. SETTING: Single urban academic healthcare system. PARTICIPANTS: Sixty patients who were eligible and overdue for CRC screening at the time of trial enrollment. METHOD: Using Andersen's Behavioral Model, we developed an interview guide to systematically assess factors shaping screening decisions and FIT uptake. Close-ended responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Qualitative data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. RESULTS: Most participants (82%) self-reported that they had ever completed any modality of CRC screening, and nearly half (43%) completed the mailed FIT during the trial. Most patients (60%) preferred FIT to colonoscopy due to its private, convenient, and non-invasive nature; however, persistent barriers related to screening beliefs including fear of test results and cancer treatment still prevented some patients from completing any form of CRC screening. CONCLUSIONS: Mailed FIT can overcome many structural barriers to CRC screening, yet clear communication and follow-up amid centralized outreach are essential. For some patients, tailored outreach or navigation to address screening-related fears or other screening beliefs may be needed to ensure timely completion of CRC screening.

Effects of Message Framing on Cervical Cancer Screening Knowledge and Intentions Related to Primary HPV Testing.

Numerous national guidelines now include primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing as a recommended screening option for cervical cancer in the United States yet little is known regarding screening intentions for this specific screening strategy or interventions that may increase uptake. Gain- and loss-framed messaging can positively impact health behaviors; however, there is mixed evidence on which is more effective for cervical cancer screening, with no published evidence examining HPV testing. To help address this gap, this study compared the effects of message framing on screening knowledge and intentions related to primary HPV testing. We randomized females aged 21-65 (n = 365) to receive brief messaging about cervical cancer screening with either gain- or loss-framing. In January-February 2020, participants completed pretest and posttest measures evaluating cervical cancer knowledge, beliefs, and intentions to be screened using HPV testing. We used generalized estimating equations to model message and framing effects on screening outcomes, controlling for age, education, race, and baseline measures. In comparison to pretest, messaging significantly increased HPV-related screening intentions [adjusted OR (aOR): 2.4 (1-3.5)] and knowledge [aOR: 1.7 (1.2-2.4)], perceived effectiveness of HPV testing [aOR: 4.3 (2.8-6.5)], and preference for primary HPV screening [aOR: 3.2 (1.2-8.5)], regardless of message framing. For all outcomes, no significant interaction by message framing was observed. Brief public health messaging positively impacted HPV-related screening intentions, knowledge, and beliefs, independent of message framing. In conjunction with other strategies, these results suggest that messaging could be an effective tool to increase uptake of primary HPV testing. PREVENTION RELEVANCE: Primary HPV tests are more sensitive and offer greater reassurance than Pap tests alone yet use for routine cervical cancer screening remains low. Brief public health messaging can positively impact awareness, knowledge, and screening intention regarding primary HPV testing. Messaging campaigns paired with other strategies can increase uptake across populations.See related Spotlight, p. 823.

The effect of using fecal testing after a negative sigmoidoscopy on the risk of death from colorectal cancer.

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether receiving a fecal occult blood test after a negative sigmoidoscopy reduced mortality from colorectal cancer. METHODS: We used a nested case-control design with incidence-density matching in historical cohorts of 1,877,740 50-90-year-old persons during 2006-2012, in an integrated health-system setting. We selected 1758 average risk patients who died from colorectal cancer and 3503 matched colorectal cancer-free persons. Colorectal cancer-specific death was ascertained from cancer and mortality registries. Screening histories were determined from electronic and chart-audit clinical data in the 5- to 10-year period prior to the reference date. We evaluated receipt of subsequent fecal occult blood test within five years of the reference date among patients with negative sigmoidoscopy two to six years before the reference date. RESULTS: Of the 5261 patients, 831 patients (204 colorectal cancer deaths/627 controls) had either negative sigmoidoscopy only (n = 592) or negative sigmoidoscopy with subsequent screening fecal occult blood test (n = 239). Fifty-six (27.5%) of the 204 patients dying of colorectal cancer and 183 (29.2%) of the 627 colorectal cancer-free patients received fecal occult blood test following a negative sigmoidoscopy. Conditional regressions found no significant association between fecal occult blood test receipt and colorectal cancer death risk, overall (adjusted odds ratio = 0.93, confidence interval: 0.65-1.33), or for right (odds ratio = 1.02, confidence interval: 0.65-1.60) or left-colon/rectum (odds ratio = 0.77, confidence interval: 0.39-1.52) cancers. Similar results were obtained in sensitivity analyses with alternative exposure ascertainment windows or timing of fecal occult blood test. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that receipt of at least one fecal occult blood test during the several years after a negative sigmoidoscopy did not substantially reduce mortality from colorectal cancer.