As cancer screening continues to evolve, health systems are navigating a rapidly expanding toolkit of diagnostics from established stool-based tests to blood-based multi-cancer early detection (MCED) technologies.
Deploying these tools effectively requires infrastructure, cross-specialty collaboration and a plan for what comes next.
During a recent webinar, Becker’s Healthcare and Exact Sciences now Abbott, brought together leaders from University Hospitals, West Virginia University Medicine and Abbott to discuss how organizations are designing and refining their screening strategies, integrating new technologies and building the collaborative infrastructure to support patients from initial screening through diagnosis and treatment.
Here are four key takeaways from the conversation:
1. Effective screening requires multiple approaches
Panelists emphasized that improving colorectal cancer screening requires more than a single solution. Susan Eason, assistant director with the West Virginia University Cancer Institute’s Department of Cancer Prevention and Control, described a multi-pronged strategy that included assessing patients’ family and personal history for CRC risk, using EHR reminders, sharing screening performance data with clinicians and expanding access through at-home testing options.
Saleem Chaudhry, MD, division chief and endoscopy director at University Hospitals St. John Medical Center, added that while his organization’s colorectal cancer screening rate already exceeds the state average, the mindset is one of continuous improvement.
He stressed that any screening strategy must be accompanied by downstream readiness that involves strengthening endoscopy infrastructure, ensuring colonoscopy access after a positive result and aligning care teams across GI, oncology and primary care.
Tom Beer, MD, chief medical officer of MCED at Abbott, noted that while proven screening tests for colorectal, breast, cervical and lung cancers have made a real impact, approximately two-thirds of cancer diagnoses and deaths involve cancers for which there is currently no routine screening. Abbott’s Cancerguard® MCED test, designed to help detect detect 50 cancer types and subtypes from a blood draw, is intended to complement — not replace — established single-cancer screening protocols.
2. Personalization and population-level reach must coexist
One of the central tensions the panel addressed was how to design programs that can scale across large, diverse populations while still accounting for individual risk. Dr. Beer offered a practical framework: Abbott’s Cologuard Plus® and Cancerguard tests are designed for general population use — available for individuals 45 and older, and 50 and older, respectively — while its Riskguard® test interrogates 59 cancer-related genes to support risk stratification and personalized screening guidance for individuals with genetic predisposition.
Sharda Udassi, MD, associate chief quality officer at WVU Medicine, described a two-tiered approach. Here, establishing evidence-based population standards comes first — such as CRC screening for adults ages 45 to 75 — and then layering personalized risk identification on top of that baseline, assisted by emerging AI-enabled tools as they mature.
3. Integration is critical
Panelists were candid about the operational difficulty of translating new diagnostic tools into routine clinical practice. Dr. Chaudhry described the volume of questions he has fielded from primary care physicians about newer blood-based CRC screening options, noting that incorporating them effectively requires clear clinical criteria, defined follow-up pathways and answers to basic workflow questions — including screening frequency guidelines that, for some newer tests, are still forthcoming.
Dr. Beer outlined several integration initiatives at Abbott: embedding tests into EHR order sets to make them readily accessible for providers, offering a consumer-initiated portal supported by a telehealth provider for patients without reliable primary care access and providing patient navigation support to help individuals follow through on positive results and complete downstream diagnostic steps.
Dr. Udassi emphasized that WVU Medicine’s quality team plays an enabling role in implementation: building clinical care pathways, piloting tools in smaller environments first, and scaling once workflows are validated.
A recent pilot in a single outpatient clinic yielded a 16% improvement in screening rates in one year — a proof of concept that the team is now working to replicate across a 25-hospital system spanning four states.
4. Collaboration and accountability
Across all four panelists, screening improvement is a system-level endeavor that requires deliberate collaboration. Dr. Chaudhry described regular educational sessions between gastroenterologists and primary care physicians at University Hospitals as a key mechanism for keeping frontline providers current on evolving evidence, test options and clinical criteria.
Dr. Udassi framed the quality team’s role as building the infrastructure that transforms screening from an individual clinician’s responsibility into a system-wide priority — including governance structures, population health registries, equity metrics, closed-loop follow-up processes and shared accountability dashboards.
Dr. Beer acknowledged that no single collaboration model works across all health systems, and that Abbott’s approach is to meet each partner where they are.
“We are at a pivotal moment in cancer screening,” Dr. Beer said. “The future will require us to build robust systems to screen everyone that needs to be screened appropriately, and at the same time, be able to personalize those screening programs as we better understand individual risk.”
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