E-Mail
Colorectal cancer screening rates jumped by more than 1,000 percent when researchers sent take-at-home tests to patients overdue for testing at a community health center that predominantly serves people of color. Instead of the oft-standard text message that simply reminds a patient that they are overdue for screening, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania made it the default to send a take-at-home test to the patient s home unless they opted out via a text message prompt. The research was published in the
Journal of General Internal Medicine. Colorectal cancer screening rates remain limited in underserved populations, which includes those in the clinic we partnered with, Shivan Mehta, MD, associate chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine and an assistant professor of Medicine. We saw that there is an opportunity to use text messaging and new insights from behavioral science to increase uptake.