There’s no question screening saves lives. The decades-long focus on screening has helped reduce breast cancer mortality rates by 40%.
But new data is making something else clear: screening doesn’t catch every patient who may need breast care. Often, patients with incidental findings are among the highest risk — data from a large hospital system shows they are 6.2 times more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than screening patients. And yet, these are the patients that routine screening programs may miss because more than half of them fall outside routine screening eligibility.
Ensuring no patient gets left behind
Eon Breast, an AI-powered, human supported platform designed to identify, track, and manage all patients — not just those identified through routine screenings — can help change that. By unifying incidental findings with screening workflows and embedded Breast Care Navigators, the platform enables health systems to deliver timely care coordination and follow-up for patients identified through any imaging pathway.
Results from a large health system, which implemented Eon Breast across 53 locations over 18 months, demonstrate how the solution can help early detection programs seamlessly expand to include incidental findings, while gaining operational efficiency and maintaining consistent performance that is compliant with MQSA regulations.
Helped diagnose 256 cancers across incidental and screening pathways
Led to a 2.7x increase in completed downstream exams per month for programs live for more than a year
Restored 4 hours of operational capacity per site per week that could be redirected to patient care
Automated >42K letters per month, on average
Management — not identification — of incidentals is the real problem
The significance of incidental findings is well recognized among clinicians. And many hospitals and health systems focused on improving cancer identifications know that incidental pathways can serve as an important safety net for patients who may not be eligible for — or receiving — routine screening. But that’s only if systems are designed to act on the finding.
Radiologists routinely find and document meaningful breast-related abnormalities they see on radiology exams performed for reasons unrelated to screening. These findings live — and are often buried — in radiology reports outside the workflows designed for screening and follow-up.
From there, the path forward isn’t consistent and that means patients can fall through the cracks. Follow-up depends on manual processes, local workflows, and whether someone happens to catch it. The finding has to be verified and next steps — including ownership — determined. This work cuts across teams and rarely fits neatly into existing systems. Patients also need to be followed over time and because of the operational burden of manual tracking, that’s another opportunity for a breakdown in care.
The challenges are compounded as incidental findings add to the volume of patients that already stretched teams have to manage. Many health systems do not have established programs built to manage this level of longitudinal coordination. Electronic medical records house clinical data, but are not built to manage follow-up care over time.There are a growing number of AI tools and platforms, and other point solutions available today can flag findings, but they rely on static workflows that don’t adapt as care plans evolve. Many of these solutions also create siloes between findings identified incidentally and screening pathways.
The result is a growing gap between identifying patients and ensuring they receive care.
Closing that gap requires operational infrastructure designed to advance care from initial finding through follow-up over time. That includes validating findings, activating the right care plan based on clinical context, and keeping patients connected to care over time — without adding to the operational burden.
Eon Breast — a unified platform for managing all patients requiring care
Eon Breast is designed to support end-to-end management for all patients who require follow-up whether they enter through an incidental or a screening pathway. The solution doesn’t simply scan radiology reports to flag incidental findings that may require follow-up. It brings fragmented workflows into a single system of action enabling health systems to consistently identify patients in need of breast care, manage them longitudinally throughout their entire episode of care, and sustain measurable clinical and financial outcomes at scale — without adding headcount.
Breast abnormalities identified outside screening pathways are automatically detected by Eon’s clinical AI engines and placed into a standardized workflow alongside screening patients — creating a single, centralized process rather than parallel manual ones.
Embedded Breast Care Navigators act as an extension of local care teams to manage outreach and care coordination, while documentation, follow-up tracking, and regulatory reporting are automated to reduce manual burden.
Program performance, compliance metrics, and follow-up management are visible across sites in a single platform, enabling leaders to consistently monitor system-wide performance without relying on separate tools or local spreadsheets
By unifying management of screening and incidental breast findings, Eon Breast reduces administrative burden and standardizes workflows, expands health systems’ ability to effortlessly scale their breast care programs, improve adherence, and achieve measurable downstream financial and clinical benefits without adding staff.
Eon Breast is now commercially available to all hospitals and health systems.
