Summarizing The Impact of Your Lung Screening Program

ONCO > Summarizing The Impact of Your Lung Screening Program

OncoNav provides a comprehensive platform for documenting and transmitting lung screening cases and allows for customized reporting to summarize the impact of your facility’s lung screening program. In this blog post, we will discuss documenting and tracking your lung screening patients and explore transitioning those patients from lung screening and incidental nodules to cancer diagnoses through survivorship. We will also examine transmitting to the Lung Cancer Screening Registry (LCSR) via the American College of Radiology (ACR) interface and briefly discuss reporting to validate the efficacy of your lung screening program.

Tracking Your Lung Screening Patients

Lung screening navigators typically have a very well-oiled machine when it comes to the process of getting a patient screened for lung cancer. They may be involved in the process early to ensure that the patient meets the qualifications to have a low dose CT (LDCT) lung screening. They may also follow up with the patient and the providers after the results have returned. This generally includes phone calls or sending result letters. The navigator may also take on the responsibility of determining when the patient should return based on their Lung-RADS designation from the LDCT scan. This is where the well-oiled machine risks breakdown, and patients may fall through those cracks.

Using OncoNav as your lung screening documentation platform can prevent these issues that may arise. While documenting your patient’s LDCT in OncoNav, you can very quickly add a follow-up task based on your patient’s Lung-RADS. This follow-up task is added to the patient and navigator calendars and will pop up as a reminder when that patient is due. This works great for those patients with a negative LDCT that need to follow up in a year for their annual scan. Navigators can put away those never-ending spreadsheets to keep track of the follow-ups for lung screening patients.

When those patients are due for their annual LDCT scans, the navigator can easily create a batch of letters to send to those patients as a reminder to get their annual screen scheduled. This batch of letters is customized with each individual patient’s information as documented in OncoNav to allow the navigator to create a large batch of letters one time without having to edit the letter for each patient.

Transition from Lung Screening to Incidental Nodules to Cancer Diagnosis to Survivorship

When a patient is found to have an incidental nodule or a lung cancer diagnosis, the navigator may hand that patient off to someone else to manage for the rest of that continuum. OncoNav provides a seamless transition for those patients. Each patient can have multiple disease types and multiple navigators associated with them. The lung screening navigator can easily assign a new patient task to the incidental nodule or lung cancer navigator to begin following that patient. Having the screening data visible with the cancer diagnosis data allows you to track the progression of that patient from screening to diagnosis, and then treatment to survivorship. Lung cancer screening programs can track the turnaround times from a patient’s LDCT scan to a cancer diagnosis and monitor how quickly that patient moves through the system.

Transmit to the LCSR via ACR Interface

OncoNav can transmit lung screening cases to the LCSR directly from the application. When submitting lung screening cases to the LCSR, there are many data items that are required to successfully submit that case. These data items include patient identifiers, patient qualifications for lung screening, and information about the imaging procedures themselves. OncoNav guides the lung screening document to ensure that those minimum data requirements are met. Additionally, OncoNav can review logic to catch any required dependent fields are captured, such as the number of years since the patient quit smoking if the patient is a former smoker.

Lung Screening Reporting

OncoNav includes pre-built reports to display information about your lung screening program as documented in OncoNav.

• ACR Error Report – Displays each patient’s lung screening exam that transmitted to the LCSR but returned an error with the error that was returned to allow for resolution of the error.
• Lung Screening Statistics – Displays data about how many cases were transmitted with the current ACR reporting status, counts for each Lung-RADS, how many of those cases returned with a lung cancer finding, and the overall stage of that diagnosis.

Reporting in OncoNav can also be created by the user to provide additional detailed granularity using specific fields in the database. These ad hoc reports use filters and lists which can be saved for recurring use and frequent reporting. In the image below, for example, we created a cross tabulation to view the Lung-RADS categories by age groups for more analysis of our lung screening population.

Thank you for taking the time to read more about lung screening support with OncoNav. For more information about this and other reporting options available in OncoNav, please reach out to us at support@onco-nav.com. If you’re not a current client and would like to see a demo, please email us at sales@oncolog.com or click the link Schedule a Demo from the Onco website.