Joanna Thompson on Engaging With PCPs for a Successful Lung Cancer Screening Program

Highlands Oncology Group has found the most success getting the word out about its lung cancer screening program by directly engaging with primary care physicians (PCPs), said Joanna Thompson, multidisciplinary program manager, Highlands Oncology Group.

Transcript

What outreach is Highlands Oncology Group doing to reach potentially high-risk individuals and get them screened for lung cancer?

So, there are 2 areas of outreach that we focus on. The first one is targeting the patient population that we're trying to enroll in the screening program. So, we've done that through billboards, radio ads, TV ads, various marketing tools, we've done health fairs, and have reached a few patients and participants that enroll into our program that way.

But we have really found that we get the most engagement when we focus on kind of the second area of outreach, which is directly to the primary care physicians who are seeing the patients and already talking to them about other screenings, and their health overall. And so, the way we do this is hosting a physician education event, we usually do it at a nice restaurant, we—Dr. Dan Bradford and I—will go through a presentation about our lung cancer screening program. And then we just spend time connecting with the physicians, but also their staff who are actually going to be the ones sending the referrals, and just have found this to be a very useful tool.

And when the primary care doctors really buy in, they start sending a lot of patients, and the more that we screen, the more lives we save. And so, we do spend a lot of our efforts engaging with primary care doctors directly.