It is said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This adage may ring more true for cancer than any other disease.
The latest issue of Advocate Aurora Research Institute’s Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews (JPCRR) features several investigations into how patients make decisions regarding cancer screening recommendations and what steps clinical practices can take to improve rates when lagging.
“The purpose of cancer screening is early detection, which hopefully leads to early prevention or treatment,” wrote oncologist Michael Thompson, MD, PhD, in his editorial that sets the stage for this issue’s cancer screening and prevention theme. “There remains much to be learned about how we can best use screening measures, both old and new, to detect malignancies as early as possible without unnecessarily wasting valuable time and resources.”
Works reported in this issue of JPCRR contribute significantly to this knowledge base. For example, Morley and colleagues implemented quality improvement strategies over a seven-year period, including the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in an effort to increase breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening rates in several safety-net primary care practices. An original research study by Saman et al analyzed patients’ perceptions toward a clinical decision support tool targeting cancer prevention, and a brief report by Schrager et al evaluated the association of various patient and clinician characteristics on breast cancer screening rates for women in their 40s.
The complete table of contents for Volume 8, Issue 4 of JPCRR includes:
- Refining a postpandemic approach to cancer screening
- Patient perceptions of using clinical decision support for cancer screening and prevention
- Communication skills training: a means to promote time-efficient patient-centered communication in clinical practice
- Improving cancer screening rates in primary care via practice facilitation and academic detailing: a multi-PBRN quality improvement project
- Increasing breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screenings: a qualitative assessment of barriers and promoters in safety-net practices
- Patient and clinician characteristics that predict breast cancer screening behavior in 40–49-year-old women
- Integrating patient-reported outcomes into clinical genetic testing for familial hypercholesterolemia
- Patient-centered home cancer screening attitudes during COVID-19 pandemic
- Impact of COVID-19 on screening rates for colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer: practice feedback from a quality improvement project in primary care
- A novel code team leader card to improve leader identification
- In pursuit: a mother’s account of her son’s rare disease diagnosis journey
Advocate Aurora Health-affiliated authors featured in this issue include Dr. Thompson, pediatric intensivist Vinod Havalad, MD, and many more clinicians and researchers who contributed to the 2021 Advocate Aurora Health Scientific Day abstract supplement.
Visit aah.org/jpcrr to access current or archived journal content. Follow @JPCRR on Twitter for regular publication updates and various patient-centered news.
Published by Advocate Aurora Health, the Journal of Patient-Centered Research and Reviews is a PubMed-indexed medical journal dedicated to scholarly works that aim to improve patient-centered care practices, health outcomes and patient experiences. JPCRR readership spans more than 200 countries.
To learn more about Advocate Aurora’s research, visit aurora.org/research.