Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer and 28,000 Texans die of lung cancer each year. Many of these smokers may be eligible for lung cancer screening (LCS), which can reduce the number of deaths from lung cancer. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now covers lung cancer screening, but requires that patients receive smoking cessation treatment and an opportunity to make a shared decision about LCS with a healthcare provider before they are referred for screening. Busy primary care providers are greatly challenged to meet these requirements, and new feasible strategies are needed to improve the quality of smoking cessation treatment and shared decision making for LCS. Currently...

Read More

Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer and 28,000 Texans die of lung cancer each year. Many of these smokers may be eligible for lung cancer screening (LCS), which can reduce the number of deaths from lung cancer. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services now covers lung cancer screening, but requires that patients receive smoking cessation treatment and an opportunity to make a shared decision about LCS with a healthcare provider before they are referred for screening. Busy primary care providers are greatly challenged to meet these requirements, and new feasible strategies are needed to improve the quality of smoking cessation treatment and shared decision making for LCS. Currently, LCS represents a missed opportunity to address smoking cessation. This project is a collaboration between tobacco control and decision making experts at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and two large medical centers with active LCS programs located along the Texas Gulf Coast and in Northeast, Texas: The University of Texas Medical Branch and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler. Primary care providers from both organizations will be assigned to either: 1) Usual Care, where providers offer patients guideline-based smoking cessation and shared decision making during a routine office visit; or 2) Centralized Care, where patients receive smoking cessation and shared decision making about LCS by telephone from a trained counselor. We expect that patients who receive smoking cessation and shared decision making through the Centralized Care model will be more likely to quit smoking and make more informed decisions about screening than patients who receive Usual Care. This study will provide important new evidence about effective and feasible methods for addressing the leading cause of lung cancer, smoking, and providing patients with an opportunity to make high-quality decisions about whether screening is right for them.

Read Less