The accredited cancer facilities that were part of the study focused on efforts to raise awareness of screenings, including patient education and social media campaigns, doctor outreach and extended hours.
At Northeast Georgia Medical Center, internal medicine residents tracked patients who were overdue for screenings and reminded doctors to order their exams.
They also held community luncheons and ran social media campaigns that were translated into 5 languages. Over a 6-month-period, they used 40 different interventions and performed 15,284 mammograms—more than 900 mammograms over their goal.
At Henry Ford Health in Detroit, their staff held virtual focus groups to identify barriers and increase mammograms among African American and Hispanic women.
Interestingly, transportation and childcare were less of an obstacle than they thought they would be.
Rather, women didn’t know they needed the exams, or they worried about what the results would show.
They then connected with parish nurses at local churches to educate women and contacted patients to make appointments.
As a result, they increased mammograms for African American women by 17% and for Hispanic women by 25%.
As a result of the Return-to-Screening study, 814 quality improvement projects were started with the goal of adding 70,000 screening tests in 6 months.