I've taken cancer screenings for granted since I'm one of those fortunate enough to have health insurance, and it didn't occur to me that many uninsured women were going without regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer. A story today on Kaiser Health News mentions this fact and highlights a partnership that Chicago public-health officials have forged with a company named Civis. The private company includes staffers that helped with the Obama campaign's get-out-the-vote efforts, and then moved on to help find people eligible to enroll for health insurance through the Affordable Health Care Act. The company used its expertise to identify women who were in the right age group (over 40) and were uninsured in Chicago's South Side area; those women then were then sent fliers about free screenings available to them.
The article describes some other cities using similar "big data" efforts for public-health purposes:
This project represents a distinctive step in public health outreach, said Jonathan Weiner, professor and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT in Baltimore. But Chicago is not the only city investigating how population data can be used in health programs, he added, citing New York City, Baltimore and San Diego as other examples.
"It's a growing trend that some of the techniques first developed for commercial applications are now spinning off for health applications," he said. So far, he said, "these techniques have not been as widely applied for social good and public health," but that appears to be changing.
The early signs say that the new effort in Chicago, which started earlier this year, is working. One hospital saw a big jump in the number of free mammograms, from 10 a month to 31, though the full impact may not be understood for a few months. It's not "a silver bullet" as one expert cited in the story notes, but it's a much more precise tool than most public-health outreach programs have had access to until now.
Previously: Screening could slash number of breast cancer cases, Despite genetic advances, detection still key in breast cancer, Study questions effects of breast cancer screenings on survival rates and New mammogram guidelines echo ones developed by physicians group
Photo by National Cancer Institute
