Caroline Thompson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
A surprising number of people first learn they have cancer in an emergency department, after arriving with pain, bleeding, or another acute problem. Emergency departments are not designed for this: their physicians have limited training in cancer management, and arranging follow-up care after an emergency visit is often difficult.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
emergency cancer diagnosis
cancer epidemiology
health disparities
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Quantify how often cancer is first diagnosed in the emergency department across 15 cancer types in SEER-Medicare records for 1.8 million Americans, and measure disparities by socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and geographic isolation.
- Estimate how much emergency-department diagnosis independently affects patient survival, using epidemiologic methods that control for cancer stage, treatment, age, and chronic conditions.
- Identify modifiable drivers of disparities by examining patterns of care before and after diagnosis among emergency-diagnosed patients, pinpointing why they bypassed primary care and where prevention is possible.
More about the research
By the time these patients arrive, the cancer has frequently advanced. Studies from other Western countries show that being diagnosed through the emergency department independently predicts worse outcomes, including shorter overall survival. In the United States almost nothing is known about how often this happens, to whom, or why. The few existing American studies cover only a handful of cancer types, but they suggest up to 30% of patients may be diagnosed this way, and that low-income patients and patients from racial and ethnic minority groups are substantially more likely to be affected.
Why it matters
Patients diagnosed with cancer in the emergency department tend to have the poorest prognoses, and they are disproportionately low-income and from racial and ethnic minority groups. Establishing who is affected, where, and why would give clinicians and health systems evidence to target earlier diagnosis — through primary care access and follow-up pathways — for the patients currently falling through the gaps, and could inform policy on reducing cancer diagnosis disparities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Monica O'Reilly-Jacob
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
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Ryan Huebinger
University of New Mexico, NM·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Build statistical models using a cardiac arrest registry to determine whether racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences in post-arrest hospital care and outcomes arise between hospitals or within them.
Cameron Kaplan
University of Southern California, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Quantify how the COVID-19 pandemic changed racial and ethnic disparities in receipt of appropriate primary care, chronic disease management and downstream health outcomes, using longitudinal individual-level claims and billing data.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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