aVeterans Integrated Service Network 12 Clinical Resource Hub, Chicago, Illinois
bUniversity of Illinois Chicago
cJesse Brown Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois
Author disclosures
The authors report no actual or potential conflicts of interest or outside sources of funding with regard to this article.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Federal Practitioner, Frontline Medical Communications Inc., the US Government, or any of its agencies.
Ethics and consent
Authors adhered to the ethical principles for medical research involving human and animal subjects outlined in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki. This project was reviewed and determined to be exempt by the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center Institutional Review Board. This work was supported, in part, by grant L0004 (IR) from the US Department of Veterans Affairs and by grantILHHU0049-19 from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (IR).
This was a small, single site project composed of predominantly White male rural veterans participating in a smoking cessation program associated with a VA facility.26,27 It is not clear whether similar outcomes would be observed in at-risk veterans who do not participate in a smoking cessation program or in more diverse communities. We were unable to contact 40% of LCS-eligible rural veterans by telephone. Twelve veterans reached by telephone declined to participate in LCS without providing a reason, and only 19 of 68 eligible veterans (28%) underwent LDCT screening during the 4-month telehealth intervention. The reasons underlying this overall low accrual rate and whether rural veterans prefer other means of personal communication regarding LCS were not determined. Lastly, generalizability of our initial observations to other veterans living in rural communities is limited because the project was conducted only in rural northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Conclusions
At-risk rural veterans may be willing to participate in a centralized LCS program at a regional VA medical facility when contacted and coordinated using telehealth modalities. These findings offer support for future prospective, multisite, VA telehealth-based studies to be conducted in rural areas. The results of this project also suggest that telehealth intervention could increase referrals of at-risk rural veterans to the closest centralized LCS program located at a regional VA medical facility.
