Opportunity and Promise of Stool-based Organized Colorectal Cancer Screening Programs

Abstract

Although stool-based organized colorectal cancer (CRC) screening programs increase screening rates and reduce CRC mortality, there remain barriers to adoption and challenges to successful implementation. Health policies, incentives, and data fragmentation influence the adoption of organized screening programs. Organized outreach programs can uniformly deliver fecal immunochemical tests to nearly all health system members who are due and eligible, but the next level of organized intervention will be to leverage disaggregated data to identify individual members and subgroups that could benefit from additional or tailored services. There is an urgent need for policies to drive more widespread implementation of organized CRC screening programs and for continued innovation in health services delivery so that organized screening programs, when implemented, can achieve their full potential.