Publications by authors named "Courtney J Diamond"
Importance: Realizing the benefits of cancer screening requires testing of eligible individuals and processes to ensure follow-up of abnormal results.
Objective: To test interventions to improve timely follow-up of overdue abnormal breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancer screening results.
Design, Setting, And Participants: Pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial conducted at 44 primary care practices within 3 health networks in the US enrolling patients with at least 1 abnormal cancer screening test result not yet followed up between August 24, 2020, and December 13, 2021.
Article Synopsis
- A new automated natural language processing (NLP) method was developed to extract detailed data on Barrett's Esophagus (BE) surveillance and treatment from electronic health records (EHR).
- The study involved analyzing data from BE-related endoscopies between 2016 and 2020, where gastroenterologists labeled data and an NLP technique was used to generate accurate diagnosis and treatment information.
- The results showed that the NLP method achieved high accuracy in labeling endoscopy events, making it effective for extracting valuable clinical data for research and assessing quality metrics.
Cancer screening and timely follow-up of abnormal results can reduce mortality. One barrier to follow-up is the failure to identify abnormal results. While EHRs have coded results for certain tests, cancer screening results are often stored in free-text reports, which limit capabilities for automated decision support.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: While substantial attention is focused on the delivery of routine preventive cancer screening, less attention has been paid to systematically ensuring that there is timely follow-up of abnormal screening test results. Barriers to completion of timely follow-up occur at the patient, provider, care team and system levels.
Methods: In this pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial, primary care sites in three networks are randomized to one of four arms: (1) standard care, (2) "visit-based" reminders that appear in a patient's electronic health record (EHR) when it is accessed by either patient or providers (3) visit based reminders with population health outreach, and (4) visit based reminders, population health outreach, and patient navigation with systematic screening and referral to address social barriers to care.