Lung cancer screening is a challenge to implement

A comprehensive lung cancer screening program carried out at Veterans Health Administration hospitals was taxing to implement and revealed a large number of patients with results requiring follow-up, though only 1.5 percent had cancers.

Investigators at eight VHA hospitals, led by the VHA’s National Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Durham, N.C., looked at records from about 93,000 primary care patients and identified 4,246 eligible for screening, based on age, medical history, and smoking history.

Approximately 58 percent of the eligible patients consented, and 2,106 underwent screening with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT). The mean age of patients was 65 years, and 96 percent of patients were male.

Nearly 60 percent of patients screened (1,257) had nodules, 1,184 patients (56.2 percent) required tracking, and 31 patients (1.5 percent) had lung cancer.

The pilot study was developed in response to a 2013 recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force favoring annual screening with LDCT in current or former heavy smokers between 55 and 80 years old.

The recommendation sparked concerns about the practicability of implementing large-scale lung cancer screening, which colleagues’ study are seemed to underscore. For example “creating electronic tools to capture the necessary clinical data in real time ... proved to be difficult, even with the VHA’s highly regarded electronic medical records,” the investigators wrote. A key measure used in the screening program – cigarette pack-years – was “not fully captured” in the system’s EMR.

The investigators also noted that if the eligibility criteria used in the pilot program were applied to the VHA nationwide, about 900,000 patients would be eligible for LDCT screening, and that fewer than 60 percent of patients and discussing with them the benefits and harms of [screening] will take significant effort for primary care teams,” the researchers noted.

In addition, the required care follow-up “may stress the capacity” of radiology and pulmonology services, the study authors cautioned.

Finally, “primary care still needs to be involved in deciding which incidental findings need further evaluation,” they wrote. “These clinical efforts will require coordination and communication among clinical services and between patients and staff, and dedicated coordinators will need to be hired.”

The investigators noted that their findings might not be generalized to non -VHA health care systems. The experience of the VHA, “owning to its central organizational structure may represent a best-case scenario.”