Do technologists influence breast cancer screening utilization?

As healthcare providers throughout the world fight to improve breast screening utilization, researchers in Australia looked into the impact individual technologists, or radiographers, can have on getting patients to return in the future.

“It remains undisputed that for any screening program to be a success, population uptake must be both initially high and maintained throughout subsequent screening rounds,” lead author S. L. Savaridas of BreastScreen WA in Perth, Australia, and colleagues wrote in Clinical Radiology.

The team explored data from 2007 to 2013 for their research, selecting “re-attendance success” as their primary outcome measure. Re-attendance was considered a failure if the patient returned after the recommended timeframe or if they never returned at all.

During those seven years, 69 percent of women attended their follow-up screening mammogram within the recommended timeframe, which the authors called out as “well below target.” When 11 technologists were selected at random, their success rates ranged from 59 percent to 76 percent. Savaridas et al. found this to be a “significant variation.”

“The similarly of the logistic regression results from the subset of randomly selected radiographer's cohort to those of the entire dataset suggests that the observation of significant variation in the rescreening success rates between radiographers is also likely in the entire radiographer workforce,” the authors wrote.

Overall, Savaridas and colleagues concluded that factors related to individual technologists “appear to influence a woman’s decision to return for their next screening round.” They noted that further research is required to research why such variation between technologists exists and what leaders can do to improve utilization in the future.