Novant health equity team raised the rate of cancer screenings in Waughtown last year

When was the last time you went to the doctor? When did you last get a cancer screening? 

Those are the types of questions Dr. David Henao is used to asking patients on a daily basis. As a manager of equity and research at Novant Health, a big part of his job is identifying gaps in health care coverage. 

Barriers to access come in many forms, Henao says, whether it be racial, economic or cultural. Sometimes though, he says life just gets in the way.

"Like you have to go and pay your bills and you say, 'Oh I’m gonna do it tomorrow, I’m gonna do it this week, I’m super busy this week, I have a birthday coming, I have something to do, I don’t have money,'" Henao said. "You know, we procrastinate a lot."

Winston-Salem’s Waughtown neighborhood is one of the more impoverished in the city. There, Henao and his team found that only about 40% of adults were up to date on their colorectal cancer screenings — far below the 72% national average reported by the National Institutes of Health. 

Henao, his team and clinic staff had their work cut out for them. 

"So what [do] we do? We talk to the patients, we talk to the providers, we really do a lot of education to patients making sure that they understand why it’s so important," Henao said. "Because, when you talk about colorectal cancer screening people have a lot of ideas about the test, like you have to get a colonoscopy under anesthesia, you have issues with transportation."

Henao says many of the Waughtown patients are non-English speakers. Most clinic staff speak Spanish. For patients who speak other common languages in the area like Russian and Portuguese, he says his team used remote video interpreters. 

By the end of 2024, screening rates in Waughtown rose to 49%. 

This year, Henao says he is working on multiple research papers related to health equity in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Santiago Ochoa covers healthcare for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. Follow him on X and Instagram: @santi8a98