According to the 2022 “State of Lung Cancer” report (1), someone is diagnosed with lung cancer every 2 ½ minutes, and 356 lung cancer patients die every day. Lung cancer has one the lowest 5 year survival rates – 25% – despite significant improvement in treatments. This is in great part due to late stage diagnosis. Forty-four percent of cases are diagnosed at a late stage, where survival is only 7%. And only 5.8% of high risk individuals are screened.
If you are thinking about starting or have already started a lung cancer screening (LCS) program, that should be applauded. The goal is to diagnose lung cancer while it’s still potentially curable. So screening high risk patients – to find nodules that may be cancerous or evolve into lung cancer – makes perfect sense.
But screening high risk populations to find lung cancer is only finding the tip of the iceberg. Submerged below – and commonly missed until it’s too late – are incidental pulmonary nodules (IPNs) that become lung cancer. IPNs are just as important – and deadly – and 9 times more common than pulmonary nodules/cancers found by screening (2).
Less than 10% of health systems have some type of IPN program (3). If you do NOT have a well designed and implemented IPN program to complement your LCS program, you are missing a lot of lung cancer (and are likely not even aware). Unfortunately:
What does that mean in very practical terms? It means that for every 90 chest CT scans you read (as a radiologist) or order (as a provider), one lung cancer will be missed. For an average hospital that performs about 2,000 chest CTs a year, that translates into about 22 lung cancers missed, or at the very least a significant delay in care- potentially missing the opportunity to provide curative intent therapy. Realizing a true system-wide stage shift in lung cancer demands that IPNs are captured and managed appropriately.
If you IMPLEMENT a well-designed incidental lung program, you will find 7-8 times as many lung nodules AND lung cancers as you will find with your LCS program (8).
Well-developed IPN programs are showing improvements in both clinical processes and outcomes – diagnosing patients with earlier (curable) stage lung cancer (9-12) and retaining patients in their network for the care they need.
And there you have it.
How do I get started?
Innovative organizations realize the importance of comprehensively managing both screening and incidental pulmonary nodules to catch and treat as many potential cancer patients as possible. But how do I make the internal case for an incidental findings program at my facility? Here’s how to get started:
Interested in understanding the clinical and financial impact of a comprehensive lung cancer screening and incidental program at your facility? Contact us for your custom opportunity assessment.
Click here to learn more about how leading health systems built their lung screening and incidentals program and the results they are seeing.
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