NEW ORLEANS – in a recent survey, underscoring the need for ongoing patient education beyond the initial shared decision-making encounter, a researcher said.
Erin Hirsch
While about 9 in 10 patients recalled key information on the benefits, only about 4 in 10 recalled information on risks, according to Erin Hirsch, MSPH, of the Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora.
“This may mean we need ongoing clinician involvement or continued education about this important information, especially if the patients aren’t screening annually,” Ms. Hirsch said in a podium presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Even fewer patients could correctly recall eligibility criteria for lung cancer screening, which suggests “ongoing clinician involvement” is needed to identify appropriate patients, Hirsch added in her presentation.
Shared decision making about lung cancer screening, which is supposed to entail a balanced patient-provider conversation about eligibility, risks, and benefits, is required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to cover the cost of lung cancer screening as a preventative service, Hirsch noted in her presentation.
However, it’s largely unknown to what extent patients due for an annual screening recall information that should have been imparted in that initial discussion.
“The gap in knowledge centers around the fact that shared decision making is only required for baseline scan, but screening is recommended on an annual basis,” she said.
To test patient recall, Hirsch and colleagues developed a knowledge survey including 34 questions about lung cancer screening eligibility, risks, and benefits. The surveys went out by mail or email to 228 patients who had a baseline screening CT scan 6-12 months earlier; a total of 53 complete responses were included in the analysis, which focused on seven key questions about benefit, risk, and eligibility.
Recall was “excellent” for the benefit questions, Ms. Hirsch said, with 91% of patients able to recall that a computed tomography (CT) scan is better at detecting a possible lung cancer than a chest x-ray, while 87% recalled that without screening lung cancer is often found at a later stage when cure is less likely.
By contrast, a “moderate” amount (40%) remembered that a CT scan can suggest the patient has lung cancer when in fact they do not, she said, and only 38% recalled that radiation exposure was one of the harms of lung cancer screening, she added.
Eligibility recall was “poor,” she added, with only 21% affirming that not all current and former smokers need to be screened for lung cancer. Just 8% recalled that 55 years is the age at which beginning lung cancer screening is recommended, and 4% knew that 30 is the minimum number of pack-years required to be eligible for screening.
While these results may have clinical implications, Ms. Hirsch acknowledged a number of limitations to this pilot study. Among those was the fact that the content of the initial shared decision-making conversation could not be assessed: “We assumed that the patients were exposed to the information asked about in the survey ahead of time, but we can’t say for sure if that was true,” she explained.
Ms. Hirsch and coauthors disclosed no relationships relevant to their study.
SOURCE: Hirsch E et al. CHEST 2019. Abstract, doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2019.08.107.