Breast Cancer Risk Reduction: A Patient-Doctor Intervention

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Investigator: Celia Kaplan, DrPH
Sponsor: California Breast Cancer Research Program

Location(s): United States

Description

The proposed research combines the scientific advances in breast cancer research with health information technology (IT) to design a personalized intervention that assesses breast cancer risk for women, disseminates important breast health information, and facilitates discussion of breast cancer risk reduction practices. Our goal is to implement a tablet-PC (personal computer) based breast cancer risk education (BreastCare) intervention in the primary care setting that estimates a woman's individual risk for breast cancer and provides her and her physician with personalized breast cancer risk information and recommendations for action.

We propose to conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a tablet computer-based breast cancer risk education intervention (BreastCare) to: a) facilitate discussion of breast cancer risk reduction practices, b) improve patient-clinician communication of breast cancer risk, and c) improve patient knowledge about her individual risk of developing breast cancer. 
 
Specific hypotheses to be tested in future randomized controlled trials of the intervention are: 
1. Patient acceptability: Women participating in the BreastCare intervention group will indicate high rates of satisfaction with the format and content of the intervention. 
2. Impact: Women participating in the BreastCare intervention group will report greater participation in patient-physician discussion of breast cancer risk, have increased knowledge and understanding of risk reduction options, and have more up to-date mammography screening as compared to those in the comparison condition.