The impact of race/ethnicity concordance between patients and their navigators in time to diagnostic resolution of breast and cervical cancer screening abnormalities.

Abstract

6097 Background: Patient navigators have been shown to reduce cancer disparities among racial/ethnic minorities by improving timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer. For a group of navigators who received cultural competency training, we sought to determine if racial/ ethnic concordance of the navigator and patient improved time to diagnostic resolution of cancer screening abnormalities. Methods: Demographic data on 1466 patients and their 23 navigators from the Boston Patient Navigation Research Program were used to assess concordance by race and ethnicity. All participants with either breast (n=751) or cervical (n=715) screening abnormalities were followed up to one year. Kaplan-Meier survival curves and proportional hazards regression models examined the effect of race/ethnicity concordance on time to definitive diagnosis, adjusting for age, race, language, economic status, insurance status, and severity of screening abnormality. Analyses were performed separately for the breast and cervical groups. Results: Of the 1466 patients, 32% were White, 27% Black, 31% Hispanic, and 10% Asian. Navigators were 61% White, 17% Black, 13% Hispanic and 9% Asian. Fifty eight percent of patient-navigator pairs were concordant by race/ethnicity. Overall rate of diagnostic resolution of cancer screening abnormalities within 365 days was high at 90%. In both the breast and cervical cancer screening groups, racial/ethnic concordance was not associated with time to diagnostic resolution, with an aHR 1.03 (95% CI: 0.85, 1.25) for breast patients and HR 1.02 (95% CI: 0.85, 1.21) for cervical patients. Conclusions: Patient-navigator racial/ethnic concordance is not associated with time to diagnostic resolution of cancer screening abnormalities, in part because overall rates of diagnostic resolution were high. Our data suggest that with cultural competency training, navigators can be equally effective with patients from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.