Tarrant County and five of its surrounding counties (Denton, Wise, Parker, Hood and Johnson) are in a region that has a higher incidence of invasive breast cancer than any other part of the state. The Breast Screening and Patient Navigation (BSPAN) program has been proven successful in Tarrant County, and will now be expanded to its rural, underserved neighbors.

BSPAN has been designed according to the guidelines issued in the 2005 Texas Cancer Plan: it removes geographic and financial barriers and employs active patient navigation in a disciplined, consistent and reproducible method. BSPAN’s proven approach is to work with local community leaders and health care providers to increase access...

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Tarrant County and five of its surrounding counties (Denton, Wise, Parker, Hood and Johnson) are in a region that has a higher incidence of invasive breast cancer than any other part of the state. The Breast Screening and Patient Navigation (BSPAN) program has been proven successful in Tarrant County, and will now be expanded to its rural, underserved neighbors.

BSPAN has been designed according to the guidelines issued in the 2005 Texas Cancer Plan: it removes geographic and financial barriers and employs active patient navigation in a disciplined, consistent and reproducible method. BSPAN’s proven approach is to work with local community leaders and health care providers to increase access to breast cancer screening, diagnostic mammograms, and biopsies.

BSPAN uses multiple funding sources, and will aggressively pursue a new contracting relationship with the CDC-funded Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening (BCCS) program, a federal funding source that historically has been underutilized in Texas. BSPAN will leverage two years of CPRIT funding to create a sustainable breast health program that will establish BCCS sites in counties currently without this program, use mobile vans to supplement current free-standing screening locations, reduce time from initial abnormal presentation to clinical diagnosis through culturally appropriate patient navigation, and find more breast cancers at their early, most curable stage.

The BSPAN electronic medical record is built on a custom, scalable platform and database that tracks and documents every step of the patient navigation process – from asymptomatic screening to clinical staging of cancer, enabling real-time statistical reporting and analysis. BSPAN will demonstrate the essential elements of removing barriers by engaging political and clinical leadership, melding multiple federal, state and local funding sources, and providing culturally appropriate and consistent patient navigation – all of which work cooperatively in a comprehensive and systematic method to reduce the burden of cancer.

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