We know that mammography saves lives.
Mammography has been studied
like no other tests in all of medicine.
And if women get screened starting at age 40 every year,
we'll see a 40% reduction in mortality.
If we can find breast cancers at stage zero and stage one,
women have an over 95% chance of cure.
It also allows for less invasive surgery
and less toxic chemotherapy.
So we're offering personalized breast cancer screening
at all Rush sites, including Rush University Medical Center,
our South Loop campus, our Oak Brook campus,
Rush Oak Park Hospital, and Rush Copley Medical Center.
So when the patient comes for her yearly mammogram,
our technologist will ask them if they want to participate
in the risk assessment program.
And if they do, they give us their consent
and the technologist will ask them a series of questions.
And then we'll also feed in information into Epic,
our electronic health record.
This information is then put through
a cancer risk assessment software program.
And then we receive back information on multiple risk models
that give us the patient's lifetime risk of breast cancer.
I think one of the biggest reasons that Rush was looking
to start a program like this was just because knew
that we were missing a lot of women
that are considered high risk,
but just weren't getting into the appropriate providers.
We're using two factors to offer patients
a personalized screening experience.
One is breast density.
If the patient has dense breasts on the mammogram,
we're offering the patients additional screening.
If they're not high risk,
we offer them screening breast ultrasound.
And what we use here is called ABUS,
automated breast ultrasound.
ABUS is a wonderful technology
where we scan the entire breast with ultrasound,
and then we get three-dimensional reconstructions
of the breast.
This way, the radiologist is able to evaluate
the entire breast using these ultrasound images.
The program here at Rush has been very successful
in finding small invasive breast cancers.
When patients meet these high risk criteria,
our nurse navigator will contact the patient.
The patient will also get a letter from us,
but they will definitely also get a phone call
from our nurse navigator.
She'll explain what the results show,
and then she'll also call their clinician
to see if it's OK for her to refer them
to our high-risk clinic.
This really sets us apart.
When we do identify patients
at higher risk for breast cancer,
we are able to successfully navigate them into
a high-risk breast clinic
and give them either preventive treatments
that might prevent them from getting breast cancer
in the first place,
as well as provide them the additional screening
that would help us detect their breast cancer early
if they're at higher risk.
We're one of the only academic centers in Illinois
that uses this high-risk information
and ties it to a high-risk clinic
so that these patients are managed
by experts in breast disease.
We're really helping patients
to understand this information,
but the whole goal of our program, whether it's
patients being seen by genetic counselors
or other providers in the high-risk program
is really helping them to understand
what goes into that risk number
and what are we going to do about it.
Whether it's additional screening,
risk-reducing medications. In some situations
we even talk about risk-reducing surgeries.
Those are definitely scary things to talk about.
So we really want to make sure that patients
are understanding what goes into that.
It's all about making informed decisions for our patients
with this information.
Rush is an excellent place for women
to have their breast imaging.
This is because only experts read and perform
all breast imaging exams at Rush.
All physicians who are breast imagers at Rush
are completely specialized in breast imaging
and have been doing this for multiple years.
Rush also offers the newest technology
available for screening,
including multiple supplemental screening modalities.
We have the latest 3D tomosynthesis imaging.
We use a wide-angle tomosynthesis machine,
which we think is best for finding small breast cancers.
So it significantly changes the treatment options
when we find cancers at those early stages.