From Penn Medicine News:
“Self-scheduling helps make the path to mammogram completion a little smoother, where you don’t have to find the time to call a scheduling line, wait on hold, or go back and forth trying to find an appointment that works for your schedule,” said the study’s lead author, Kimberly Waddell, PhD, MSCI, an assistant professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. “Simple changes like these can have an outsized impact on preventive health screenings.”
As one in every eight women are affected by breast cancer, mammograms are recommended to regularly be completed for women. However, though mammograms are tied to early detection of cancer and a better prognosis for treatment, many remain overdue for their screenings.
For their study, Waddell and senior author Shivan Mehta, MD, MBA, an associate professor of Gastroenterology and the associate chief innovation officer of Penn Medicine, along with their colleagues, analyzed data from 2016-2019 when the University of Pennsylvania Health System opened up the opportunity for patients to schedule their own mammograms through their personal online patient portals and compared it to data from 2014 until 2016, before this was possible.