Posted July 16, 2009
Researchers gained some valuable information during a recent study of mammogram reminders.
Carroll Glaus learned something even more important. Glaus discovered she had a lump in her breast.
The Vancouver resident was one of about 35,000 women who participated in a study by Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research.
The program used electronic health records to identify women who’d be due for a mammogram and notified them via postcards, automated voice messages and phone calls. The reminders boosted mammography rates by more than 17 percentage points, according to the study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Glaus said she was one of the women who needed a reminder.
“We all have such busy lives,” Glaus said. “I should keep track in an organizer.
“They sent a card. It probably would have gotten shuffled off to the side if I hadn’t gotten the reminder call.”
Glaus went in for the mammogram that revealed a lump.
“They caught it soon enough. I wound up having surgery and I finished chemotherapy in November,” Glaus said. “Had I ignored it or put it off, it might not have been so good.”
About 100,000 Clark County residents are Kaiser members.
By the second year of the program in 2008, mammography rates jumped from 63 percent to more than 80 percent among women aged 50-69, researchers said.
“We know mammograms are effective, but too many women put them off, even when they have health insurance,” said lead author Dr. Adrianne Feldstein, a Kaiser physician and an investigator at the Center for Health Research in Portland.
“This study is the first to show that these reminder programs can be effective in such a large group of women. If we could improve the country’s mammography rate by the same amount, we could detect as many as 25,000 additional cases of breast cancer each year.”
The Kaiser database identified women 50 to 69 who hadn’t had a mammogram for 20 months. Starting in January 2006, they received a postcard telling them that they soon would be due for a mammogram. If they didn’t make an appointment within a month, they received their first automated call. A month later, they received a second automated call. Women who still had not made an appointment a month later received a call from a clerk in the radiology department.
Within 10 months of their first reminder, more than 75 percent of these women had completed their mammograms — compared with only 63.4 percent before the program started. After the second year of the reminder program, 80.6 percent of women had completed their mammograms.
The concept can be applied to other screenings, Feldstein said.
“Absolutely. We have another National Cancer Institute study that uses automated calls for colon-cancer screening,” Feldstein said. “When this was successful, we implemented it for Pap smear reminders.”
Date: July 12, 2009
To see more of The Columbian, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.columbian.com.
Copyright © 2009, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.
