Inside Sturdy Health's automated push to close breast cancer screening gaps

Every October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month brings a familiar reminder: catching breast cancer early saves lives. The numbers back it up; according to the American Cancer Society, when breast cancer is caught at a localized stage, the five-year relative survival rate is around 99%. The challenge has never really been whether screening works, it's getting patients who are overdue for a mammogram to actually schedule one.

That's the gap Sturdy Health set out to close, and the results show what happens when you make scheduling as easy as the science already says early detection should be.

Automated care gap outreach: turning a care gap list into booked appointments

Sturdy Health partnered with Notable to identify patients with an open breast cancer screening care gap and reach out to them directly, letting each patient pick her own date and time rather than waiting on a phone call or a mailed reminder. Across two outreach efforts this year, the pattern held steady: patients who engaged, booked.

Of 940 patients reached, 11.6% engaged with the outreach, and from there, conversion was strong. 77% of those who engaged completed the scheduling form, with a 72% conversion rate among engaged patients who went on to book a mammogram. 94% of patients who started the process said they wanted to schedule when asked, and 100% of appointments booked were done directly by the patient, with no staff outreach calls required. 

Patients noticed the difference. Of those who rated their experience, 100% rated it positively. Their comments point to exactly what made it work: the ability to pick a time at their leisure, multiple date and time options, and a process people described as simple, fast, and logical.

"I could schedule my own date and time at my leisure."

"Fast and easy! I appreciate that you provided multiple options to choose from."

"I liked seeing the available dates to schedule the appointment. Simple to use."

Notably, the data also suggests this kind of outreach surfaces gaps that had already quietly closed elsewhere. Seven patients turned out to have completed screening through another channel, something outreach caught that a static list wouldn't have. And because conversion after engagement holds steady at roughly seven in ten, the math is straightforward: every 10 additional patients who engage produce about seven more scheduled mammograms. That’s seven more patients taking a proactive approach to their preventive care. 

"We're literally preventing cancer" with automated care gap outreach

For Omar Siddiqui, Director of Primary Care, who led this work at Sturdy, the impact isn't measured in staffing hours saved. It's measured in patients who wouldn't have been screened otherwise. Asked what made the biggest difference, he put it simply: these are patients who, in his view, would not have gotten screened at all without the outreach.

“We’re literally preventing breast cancer. All of these patients are getting screened, and they wouldn’t have been getting screened otherwise. Saving staff time and provider time is ancillary – through this automation, we’re increasing our breast cancer screening rates and making our regional population healthier.”

That's the heart of it. Automating care gap outreach results in more than just a scheduling win. It could be the appointment that catches something early enough to treat.

What care gap automation makes possible

The old way of closing a care gap — a mailed letter, a fax to radiology, a staff member making outreach calls and hoping for a callback — put the burden on already-stretched teams and left plenty of patients to fall through the cracks. Automating the process doesn't replace the clinical relationship; it removes the friction standing between a patient and an appointment she was probably going to want anyway. Let patients see open times and choose one themselves, and the data suggests most of them will.

As Sturdy's results show, the constraint left isn't conversion, it's reach. That's exactly the kind of problem automation is built to solve: scaling outreach to more patients with an open care gap, without scaling the staff time it takes to do it. 

During Breast Cancer Awareness Month and beyond, closing that reach gap is one of the more direct ways technology can turn "screening saves lives" from a slogan into an appointment on the calendar.

Get in touch today to learn how you can automate care gap outreach at your health system.