Emily Cassidy, MD, Thoracic Surgeon, Our Lady of the Lake
Louisiana ranks near the bottom in the nation for early-stage lung cancer detection and five-year survival rates. The primary reasons for this are manual, fragmented workflows, and reactive rather than proactive care management, which prevents detection programs from successfully scaling to include all patients who may need care.
Louisiana’s Lung Cancer Rankings (Out of 47 States)
For our team at Our Lady of the Lake (OLOL), these statistics were a call to action. We faced the same hurdles as many health systems — reactive processes and "siloed" communication — that contribute to our state’s poor rankings.
That’s why we partnered with Eon to build our early detection program from scratch.
By implementing a longitudinal care management platform for incidental findings, we’ve moved from reactive tracking to proactive intervention and achieved meaningful, measurable improvements in both clinical and operational outcomes by detecting cancers earlier and ensuring ongoing, appropriate patient follow-up.
Understanding the lessons we learned and the practical insights we gained from our journey could help other institutions anticipate and address challenges to not just implement, but accelerate the growth of, their early detection programs so that fewer patients are lost to a lack of follow-up.
As we began to reimagine our incidental pulmonary nodule program, it quickly became apparent that our manual processes couldn't keep up with the sheer volume of findings, and we lacked a reliable way to prioritize high-risk patients or monitor adherence.
We realized that a sense of urgency and commitment alone wouldn’t help us scale. We needed the right infrastructure. Implementing Eon’s lung solution provided the "digital backbone" we needed. Beyond surfacing findings, it gave us:
With structure, came the ability to scale.
From 2021-2024, the lung program expanded from three sites to seven.
Program results included:
Technology alone is not the solution. But the right infrastructure enables consistency, accountability, and growth.
A successful program extends past identifying nodules to ensure patients are navigated and treated without delay. Before we structured our process, patients were vulnerable to delayed follow-up and misdirected referrals, follow-up was inconsistent, and our care pathways varied based on where the patient entered the system.
By utilizing a longitudinal platform, we designed repeatable, evidence-based sequences based on available resources. Importantly, we didn’t limit this structure to lung cancer screening patients. We applied it to all incidental pulmonary nodules captured through radiology, including those from the ED and inpatient setting. This approach standardizes care across diverse populations, ensuring that equity is built into the workflow.
Efficiency Gains:
Clinical judgment alone, without data to guide strategic decisions and continually refine operations, isn’t enough to build a high-volume program and operate proactively rather than reactively. We synthesized the analytics and reporting from the Eon platform, tumor registry, robotic bronchoscopy systems, and revenue cycle team to build a complete operational picture.
These metrics allowed us to pivot our focus as the program matured: starting with identification, moving to reducing time-to-treatment, and finally optimizing procedural yield.
From 2021 to 2024, we saw:
This transformation wasn't the result of a single investment, it was the product of deliberate, incremental change enabled by deploying the right team and supporting them with the right infrastructure.
My advice to clinical leaders who want to stand up a comprehensive lung program, today, knowing what I have learned over the last six years is simple: Don’t wait. Every day spent in a manual workflow is a day a patient might be missed. Start with a committed team, build a digital foundation, and let data be the guide.
You aren't just building a program. You are changing outcomes.
For a deeper look at OLOL's journey to improved early detection and outcomes, read: 5 Lessons for Building a Scalable Lung Nodule Program.
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