Brief

ScreenNJ lung cancer screening: An innovative approach to identifying individuals eligible for low dose CT scans

Data analysis & integration SDOH & health equity

The New Jersey Department of Health’s ScreenNJ initiative is a collaborative project aimed at reducing cancer incidence and mortality in New Jersey through expanding prevention and screening efforts. Early on in our partnership with the New Jersey Department of Health on their ScreenNJ initiative, we encountered issues with how a patient’s smoking history is documented, which made it difficult to determine who would be eligible for lung cancer screening. Through natural language processing, a creative and innovative approach to creating structured data, we created a process that proactively identifies individuals who would benefit from screening, which enables us to perform more targeted outreach for those most at-risk.