Increasing Adherence to Lung Cancer Screening

Investigators will conduct a pragmatic clinical trial with a 2 x 2 factorial design with clinicians that provide care to screening-eligible patients who are overdue for annual screening or diagnostic evaluation. The specific nudge strategies to be tested are: 1) gain-framed messaging delivered via text messaging to prompt patient adherence to LCS guidelines (patient nudges); and 2) electronic health record (EHR) prompts alerting clinicians when their patients are due for annual screening or diagnostic follow-up (clinician nudges). The rationale for this study is that changing external stimuli to encourage adherence to evidence-based LCS guidelines will increase early detection of lung cancer by removing individual and system-level barriers to identifying and prompting patients who are due for care. The central hypothesis is that the combination of patient and clinician strategies will have the greatest effect on increasing adherence because it will target multilevel determinants of lung cancer screening identified in our prior research including limited screening knowledge and suboptimal EHR design. The proposed strategies are designed to support equitable implementation across diverse settings and populations.

Inclusion criteria

Clinicians will be eligible if they:

• are practicing primary care or specialty care physicians at a recruiting site within the University of Pennsylvania Health System;
• care for patients who completed LCS via LDCT in 2019-2023; and
• do not opt-out of study participation.

Patients will be eligible if they:

• are eligible for LCS based on 2021 US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) population guidelines (aged 50-80; smoking history of 20-pack years; smoked within the last 15 years)
• completed LCS via LDCT in 2019-2023;
• have not been diagnosed with lung cancer;
• meet criteria for non-adherence;
• remain eligible for LCS during the trial enrollment period; and
• receive LCS care from a clinician that has not opted-out of study participation

Exclusion criteria

Patients will be excluded if they:

a) have a highly suspicious baseline LDCT (Lung-RADS 4B/X) given the presence of existing clinical pathways to ensure adherence in this group