CancerIQ’s NCoBC 2023 Recap: How Breast Centers are Connecting Risk Assessment and Preventive Care

The National Consortium of Breast Centers Annual Interdisciplinary Breast Center Conference (NCoBC) is the premiere annual event for breast health professionals. It’s an opportunity for the entire breast center team to share best practices and learn about the latest therapies and technologies, with the aim of improving patient outcomes and developing robust patient programs.

This year we were excited to see growing momentum around personalized prevention and early detection of cancer. Here are CancerIQ’s three takeaways from NCoBC 2023 (hint — it includes a major announcement that will help busy breast centers overcome staffing gaps and expand their programs):

1. Breast centers are doing the hard work to promote access to comprehensive cancer risk assessment and personalized preventive care. For example, a session on Friday, March 24, highlighted how CancerIQ partner OSF St. Francis Medical Center implemented a three-pronged marketing plan to engage physicians, patients and the community in its high-risk program. Presented by Michele Settelmyer, APN, MSN, a board-certified women’s health care nurse practitioner, the session demonstrated how partners like CancerIQ can support breast centers in ancillary but critical activities like marketing. With CancerIQ’s white-label marketing tools and expertise, OSF was able to efficiently create launch marketing and ongoing marketing campaigns to build the sustained engagement necessary for a successful high-risk program.
   
   
2. Technology is helping identify more high-risk patients across care settings. A poster presentation highlighting new data from Adventist Health showed that the health system’s partnerships with CancerIQ and Myriad Genetics helped identify more high-risk patients in breast imaging settings. The retrospective study was based on data from one Adventist Health breast imaging site in Hawaii that used CancerIQ for comprehensive cancer risk assessment and preventive care plan management, and partnered with Myriad Genetics for patient education and genetic testing. Spearheaded by Dr. Candace Westgate, the study's results showed 36.9% of patients assessed in the breast imaging setting met national guideline criteria for genetic testing, and the majority of eligible patients went on to complete the process. Additionally, of patients qualified for Tyrer-Cuzick calculation, 18.5% were identified as high-risk and in need of further screening. This showed that breast imaging practices are an effective front door for downstream care to prevent and detect cancer early.
   
   
3. CancerIQ introduced two exciting new updates to accelerate the growth of high-risk programs.
   
   
   
   
   • The first, CancerIQ Complete, provides customers with full-service virtual navigation and genetic counseling services. This offering was developed to meet the needs of high-risk programs that may have lost budget and staff members during the pandemic, or those that simply need to demonstrate demand for roles like patient navigators and genetic counselors. 
     
     “We’ve noticed during times of short resources, screening and identification continue, but the challenge comes in when programs lose key resources like navigators,” said Shannon Snyder, Vice President of Customer Success, CancerIQ. “CancerIQ Complete is meant to be a care team extension that will help fill those critical roles to ensure patient care isn’t disrupted.”
     
     
   • The second update is our new Integrated Risk Score Calculator. We added this HL7 integration to meet customer demand for more seamless risk score data. Our new Risk Score Calculator allows customers to natively capture patient risk factors within leading EHR workflows, send structured data to our risk calculator, and automatically populate existing workflows with Tyrer-Cuzick scores (7 and 8) and NCCN guidelines. This means breast center staff will now be able to offer patients the most comprehensive risk assessment available to date, while maintaining workflow efficiency and eliminating the need for IT updates with every change in clinical guidelines.

We’re still taking in the incredible feedback we got on our CancerIQ Complete. It’s clear that those working on the front lines of making an impact in breast care need more support — and we are doubling down on our commitment to give it to them!

UPCOMING WEBINAR: Join us later this month for a live follow up webinar with Rachel Forehand, RN Senior Manager, Oncology Prevention, Screening & Support Programs at Baptist Health Care to hear how CancerIQ's services have helped scale their high-risk program.

How To Get The Support You Need to Start and Grow Your High-Risk Program
Tuesday April 25th, 1:00PM ET / 12:00 PM CT