Patient Navigation for Colorectal Cancer Screening for Patients With Mental Illness and/or Substance Use Disorder

Patient Navigation for Colorectal Cancer Screening for Patients With Mental Illness and/or Substance Use Disorder

The investigators propose to develop, implement, and evaluate a novel Colorectal (CRC) screening patient navigator program for patients with Mental Health (MH) and /or Substance Use Disorder (SUD) receiving care at Massachusetts General Hospital Charlestown. The study will involve randomly assigning eligible patients to early intervention or usual care/delayed intervention groups. The investigators believe this random assignment is ethical because Patient Navigation (PN) is an extremely limited resource, and all patients identified as eligible could not be contacted by the navigators in a short period of time. Thus the investigators will randomly assign access to PN during the study period, and then allow all patients to be navigated and screened after the study period is over. As a result, all eligible patients will be referred for PN, but the timing of the referral will be randomly assigned.

Inclusion Criteria:

• adult patients aged 50-75 years who are not up to date on CRC screening (did not have had CRCs colonoscopy in the last 10 years or sigmoidoscopy in the last 5 years or fecal occult blood within last 12 months)
• receive care at MGH Charlestown
• have documented history of MH or SUD in electronic medical record

Exclusion Criteria:

• subsequently identified as having died prior to study intervention
• patients with total colectomy