A clinical adviser to Sanovas Inc warns that the US healthcare system is in danger of a shortage of resources as Medicare coverage of lung cancer screening for at-risk beneficiaries goes into effect this year.
“Medicare coverage has a ‘good news/bad news’ scenario to it at this time. On the one hand, screening at-risk Medicare beneficiaries with CT scans will absolutely reduce the number of deaths from lung cancer. On the other hand, our country’s healthcare system is going to be inundated with patients who have been diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer, a potential order-of-magnitude spike in the diagnosis of peripheral nodules,” explained Gordon H. Downie, MD, PhD, FCCP, a Pulmonologist at Northeast Texas Interventional Medicine, and a clinical adviser to Sanovas. “This expected significant increase in the diagnosis of early stage lung cancers will stress the resources now available for treating early stage lung cancers.”
