Rural Illinois Lung Cancer Screening Initiative

The long-term goal is to establish healthcare practices to increase adherence to lung cancer screening among high-risk individuals. The overall objective in this application is to establish a lung cancer screening initiative to proactively identify and screen eligible patients for LDCT using a designated nurse practitioner (NP) along with telehealth. The central hypothesis is that use of a designated NP along with telehealth will increase lung cancer screening via LDCT among high-risk, racial/ethnic minority, and rural/sub-urban patients. The rationale for this proposal is use of a NP and telehealth will help overcome the barriers physicians face in identifying eligible patients for LDCT including collecting additional information to determine eligibility, discussing the pros and cons of LDCT, providing smoking cessation/abstinence counseling, making shared decisions, and documenting this information in the patients' charts. In this prospective cohort study the nurse practitioner (NP) will proactively identify eligible individuals for LDCT using EMRs that are shared across the Department of Family and Community Medicine at SIU. These patients will be contacted and those agreeing to undergo screening will be given a referral to a nearby LDCT center. The NP will follow-up with the patients with the results of the LDCT and will refer them for further management to their primary care physician. If the results are negative for nodules then they will be followed up on a yearly basis until the participants are older than 80 years or have other life-threatening health issues.