For Deborah Lack, the importance of scheduling an annual mammogram was not lost on her — her daughter Diane Lack was a healthcare practitioner in women’s health and breast care and reminded her regularly.
And yet, despite her awareness that it was the right thing to do, it still required prodding from her daughter to make the call and schedule an appointment for her annual screening mammogram at St. Luke’s University Health Network.
Before she knew it, it came time for her appointment. Once it was over, she was excited to “treat herself” by going out for celebratory pizza. But just as she was driving away from the clinic, she received a call. Something on her scan showed the need for follow-up. Could she come by St. Luke’s One-Stop Clinic for Breast that afternoon to have it looked at right away?
Deborah didn’t make any other calls — she drove straight to the One-Stop Clinic for additional testing. When she got there, she was brought in right away to receive a breast ultrasound and biopsy. In fact, things happened so quickly that by the time her daughter Diane, who had been the first nurse navigator at the clinic and now serves as a manager of women’s imaging at St Luke’s, was able to arrive at the clinic, Deborah was already finished with the follow-up exam recommended.
Deborah Lack. Top: With daughter Diane Lack.
Forty-eight hours later, Deborah received good news: The results were benign.
Deborah’s reluctance isn’t all that uncommon — many women feel anxious about the idea of having a mammogram. And while her mammogram may have been routine, such a swift resolution in care is very often not the norm.
In the United States, it takes an average of 28 days from the time a woman has an abnormal screening mammogram until she receives a biopsy. From there, if cancer is diagnosed, it can take more than a month until the first surgeon visit and can take more than 50 days for breast surgery. For women of color, delays can be even longer. Lengthy wait times can increase patients’ worries and postpone starting treatment for those who need it. Most importantly, the delays can even impact the prognosis for women with breast cancer.
For Deborah, who had already lost her son to colon cancer two years earlier, this approach helped her get the answers she needed to regain some peace of mind. “When they said there was an irregularity in my mammogram, my heart stopped and I started to panic a little bit,” she recalls. “So when they called, it was almost like a voice from above saying, Here, we’re going to give you a quick solution. When I got there, I was scared, and they calmed me down and told me exactly what they were going to do.”
The One-Stop Clinic at St. Luke's Regional Breast Center–Center Valley.
Deborah’s experience demonstrates the new standard of care the One-Stop Clinic has helped St. Luke’s bring to life — allowing her to enjoy that celebratory pizza a little bit sooner and put fears and what-ifs to rest.
Reimagining Better Breast Cancer Care at St. Luke’s University Hospital Network
St. Luke’s performs more than 60,000 mammograms a year in its network and recognizes the impact delays can have on patient care. In 2008, the hospital estimated that 28 days elapsed between mammography screening and pathology — a turnaround time they considered unacceptable. By 2019, the healthcare network had reduced that lag to 11 days, but the team at St. Luke’s still wanted to do better.
In 2020, after further reengineering and reimagining its own processes, St. Luke’s launched its One-Stop Clinic for Breast — the first of its kind in the United States. Now patients can benefit from this rapid diagnostic approach, which reduces the waiting time for a diagnosis to just three to seven days.
As part of the clinic, St. Luke’s uses a full suite of breast cancer care technologies, including a powerful breast imaging tool called contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM). CEM, which can take less than seven minutes, combines the functional information derived from iodinated contrast administration with structural imaging derived from anatomic mammographic views to help clinicians visualize malignant areas of breast tissue.[1]
All of these improvements to women’s imaging and patient care are having an impact on patients’ lives.
“We’ve been able to improve handoffs between each step in the process to reduce the time from screening to diagnosis and treatment planning — helping ensure we get answers to our patients as quickly as possible,” says Michele Brands, St. Luke’s women’s imaging network director. “We’re proud to provide this kind of accelerated, personalized breast cancer care, because it’s what our patients deserve.”
The One-Stop Clinic at St. Luke’s is based on the model originated at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in France. As the first One-Stop Clinic in the U.S., it was developed on-site with support from PINC AI™ Applied Sciences and GE HealthCare and serves as a national model for how to bring value to payers, providers, and patients by helping accelerate breast cancer care through a multi-modality approach centered around a nurse navigator.
As the first nurse navigator for St. Luke’s One-Stop Clinic, Diane knows the impact this new approach has had on patients like her mother as they search for answers. “For patients, a navigator serves as the one common touchpoint you have throughout the entire realm of care — whenever you have a need, whenever you have a question, the nurse navigator has resources for the answers.”
She feels that the role encourages her to be present with each patient as they navigate all the various questions and considerations. It’s through that shared experience together that trust gets built and continues long after women transition to the next phase in their journey.
“Being a navigator at the One-Stop Clinic has proven to me that as a healthcare provider, it doesn’t take much to have an impact on a patient,” Diane says. “It’s about being in the right place at the right time and that every interaction can be a life-changing interaction.”
This June, St. Luke’s One-Stop Clinic for Breast was honored to be recognized at Premier’s annual Breakthroughs Conference, which spotlights groundbreaking healthcare technologies that are helping to improve the health of communities in innovative ways.
NOTES
[1] Data on file, GE HealthCare, 2017.
