‘Good enhancement’ for health care systems
Reached for comment, Aasma Shaukat, MD, MPH, professor of medicine, NYU Langone Health, and first author of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) 2021 CRC screening guidelines, said the results are “interesting but not entirely surprising.”
“There’s literature supporting that a letter or notification prior to the FIT being mailed improves its uptake. Here, the authors applied it to their health care system in a quality improvement study and demonstrated it works,” Dr. Shaukat said.
“This is a good enhancement for health care systems where most of their patients are using or accessing their health chart portal,” added Dr. Shaukat.
“Caveats are that the generalizability is not known. It requires EHR [electronic health record] support tools and patients with access to a computer and enrolled and able to access their electronic chart, likely those with high literacy and English speaking.”
Funding for the study was provided by the UCLA Health Department of Medicine. Dr. Goshgarian, Dr. Croymans, and Dr. Shaukat have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.