Spring 2003

TEACH: Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

MACGN personnel have developed a new “Tool for the Evaluation and Assessment of Cancer History” (TEACH) for use in primary care offices. TEACH is a touch-screen computer program designed to allow the user to input personal and family history information about cancer. Developers are testing this program now. The goal is to increase primary care provider’s abilities to determine inherited cancer risk.

In today’s busy health care settings, primary care providers often do not have time to conduct a thorough personal and family health history for cancer. Developers predict that the TEACH program could be placed in the waiting room where patients could complete their own family history while waiting for their appointment. Completing the entire program takes 15-20 minutes. By using TEACH in this manner the provider may be able to retrieve more information from the patient about their family history without adding to the consultation time.

The program prompts for complete information about all first and second-degree relatives of the user, whether they have had cancer or not. This information collected includes relationship to the user, age at the end of the year, type of cancer, personal diagnosis of cancer, age of cancer onset and age at death, if applicable. Next, TEACH asks about other family members with cancer. This includes cousins, nieces, nephews, and other third and fourth-degree relatives.

Once the user has completed the entire program TEACH compiles and displays a printable pedigree, or family tree, showing all of the cancer in the user’s family. This pedigree can then be printed and added to the patient’s medical files. The primary care provider can use it to determine if the patient is at increased risk for cancer as compared with members of the general population. Developers hope that this program will help providers identify risk for cancer that may have been otherwise overlooked. Based on the information compiled by TEACH the provider may observe a previously undetected pattern of cancer in the family.

Written by: Jessica Schultz, BS, TEACH project coordinator