Obed Cintron recalls starting to smoke at a very young age.
“I was smoking everything,” he said. “Not just the substance itself, but the paraphernalia that went with it.”
Cintron said when his doctor, Robert Fortuna, suggested a lung cancer screening, he was a bit rebellious at first. He said being raised in a Latino household, the culture didn’t lend to vulnerability.
“That machismo,” Cintron said. “They raised you like you're a king, and nothing can touch you, and you just handle everything.”
But at his last doctor’s appointment, earlier this year, Cintron said he put his pride aside and did the screening that Fortuna suggested. He remembers his apprehension leading up to getting the scan, but the process was better than he expected.
“The best part about it is the relief that it gives when you get a good result,” Cintron said.
Over the past three years, Fortuna and his team at UR Medicine have implemented a comprehensive lung cancer screening program, which doubled the rates of individuals screened.
The program focused solely on primary care patients and stretched across 42 URMC sites. Physicians were prompted to track individuals ages 50 to 80 who smoked at least one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years and proposed they get screened.
Some patients received a recommendation letter in the mail, some by phone or MyChart message.
“If we're able to screen more individuals, we're able to find cancers earlier,” Fortuna said. “If you're able to find the cancer earlier, the treatment options are more successful.”
Fortuna, who is also the medical director for quality and population health for UR Medicine, said through the new program, the health care network was able to identify 63 new cases of lung cancer.
He said 78% of those cases were diagnosed at an early stage.
