e-HAIL Research in Progress: Cancer Prevention and Screening in Rural Primary Care: Pilot project recruitment

The excess burden of death in rural communities from three cancers, cervical, colorectal, and lung, is greater than in other US communities. Our Primary Care Rural Screening Project (PCRSP) team plans to submit a center grant to advance integrated research in the early detection and screening of these three cancers (cervical, colorectal, and lung), to reduce cancer-related morbidity and mortality in rural primary care settings. According to the 2021 NASEM report, primary care is the most common patient point of care, so key to cancer prevention and screening.

The PCRSP is comprised of four integrated projects, two focused on primary care-based secondary prevention for CRC and lung cancer, and two focused on primary prevention and risk factor modification via HPV vaccination and smoking cessation, all tailored to rural residents. The research projects will receive support from four cores: Administrative, Integrative Analytics, Dissemination and Implementation (D&I)/Communication, and Community Outreach and Recruitment. Our program project, with its shared theme and multilevel approach, will create synergies among the projects and cores to generate significant and novel scientific insights into how to improve cancer prevention and screening uptake in rural primary care.

We are seeking some novel pilot projects in the applications of AI to rural cancer prevention and screening. We are also interested in the applications of NLP for language analysis to explore the core values of a (rural) culture, and differing perceptions of the world cross-culturally. These projects would be funded with the center grant.