Improving Colorectal Cancer Screening Adherence: Advantages of FIT

Announcer:

You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Theodore Levin, who’s a Professor of Health System Science at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, the Associate Director at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, and the Clinical Lead for Colorectal Cancer Screening for the Permanente Medical Group. He’ll be discussing how fecal immunochemical testing, or FIT, can help improve colorectal cancer screening adherence.

Here’s Dr. Levin now.

Dr. Levin:

The fecal immunochemical test is a very valuable test, particularly for people who are early in their screening history. They don’t have experience with screening. Often people in their 40s are juggling multiple competing demands on their time, so using an accessible test like the fecal immunochemical test makes it very easy for people to kind of enter into the screening process even if they have not had any experience with it. Often people in their 40s, they don’t have contact, that much contact with people who may have had colon cancer, so it often feels like, “Gee, that’s something that’s far off in the future,” even though, increasingly, people are developing colon cancer at younger ages.

People in their late 50s into their 60s usually have some contact. They’ve got some familiarity with somebody who’s had colon cancer because it’s so common, and that is often a strong motivator for people to do screening even if it’s not a close family member. It might be an acquaintance, colleague, somebody they work with, or somebody who helps them. I’ve had people come in to ask to be screened because their accountant developed colon cancer, and it kind of made it very real for them that it’s something they should take action on.

The fecal immunochemical test takes five minutes. It’s very easy to do. It could all be handled at home and sent back through the US mail, so it doesn’t take a lot of time or disrupt anyone’s other activities. You don’t have to miss work for it. You don’t have to get a driver to get it done, so it’s kind of an accessible sort of gateway to colon screening, and it’s a great way to do the screening at scale as well. In our system we can mail out those tests to 800,000, 600,000 people and really get them reminded to do their screening with an accessible test that they can do right in their home, whereas colonoscopy often involves a referral and some communication back and forth with the gastroenterology office and or other endoscopist. And it takes time to schedule. You have to miss time from work. So this is much more accessible for people.

Announcer:

That was Dr. Theodore Levin talking about the use of fecal immunochemical testing to expand colorectal cancer screening. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!