The importance of primary HPV screening

Anne Banfield, MD:

I'm Dr. Anne Banfield. I currently am the physician, clinical, and administrative director for MedStar St. Mary's Hospital in Southern Maryland. I am currently serving as the ACOG representative on the American Cancer Society's Cervical Cancer Primary HPV Screening Provider Workgroup Roundtable. And my colleagues and I will be presenting on primary HPV screening for cervical cancer this Sunday at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

What were some of the highlights from your presentation at ACOG?

Banfield:

So the American Cancer Society, in conjunction with the US government, put together a roundtable on using primary HPV for cervical cancer screening. About a year and a half ago, they did invite the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists along with other stakeholders to be part of that roundtable. And there are multiple workgroups associated with that. Our workgroup in particular is about provider needs. And so we're really working on helping providers have the tools that they need to understand why we're recommending primary HPV screening for cervical cancer, and how they can communicate that to their patients and to colleagues who maybe are not familiar with that concept.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

Do you have any clinical pearls for talking to patients about primary HPV screening?

Banfield:

As far as talking to your patients about primary HPV screening for cervical cancer, we really want providers to focus on the efficacy of the test, and how good HPV is and the testing for high risk HPV types at screening our patients and giving us good information about what their long term outcomes can be. Primary HPV screening does give us a lot of information about what we can expect for our patients in the following years. And it allows us to potentially offer that screening to patients who can't make it to an office visit, as we are currently looking at ways for self testing, which opens a whole other door to screening for your patients. So we want our providers to really focus on those sorts of things. As a bonus for providers in the health care system, there is a cost savings associated with going to primary HPV screening, that we don't really want the providers to be focusing on that as a strategy to communicate with their patients.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

What are your thoughts on the increasing interest in self-testing for HPV?

Banfield:

So, I think anything that brings access to our patients is a great tool if it can be validated. I currently practice in rural Southern Maryland and prior to this, I practiced in rural West Virginia. Both of those are areas where we don't necessarily have as much accessibility for our patients, to see providers, whether that's a physician or family practice provider, or an AP, as would be ideal. And so if we have tools where those patients can self screen, and have that screening come in in some way to be evaluated, that is an incredible access tool that would then provide and help us to increase the screening for cervical cancer. And we know that cervical cancer screening is nowhere where we'd like it to be. And especially in communities of color. We know it is nowhere near where we where we would like it today.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

What are some takeaways from your presentation?

Banfield:

I would say the top takeaways we want folks to see are the efficacy of the testing the way that it can improve potentially accessibility for our patients, and the way that it can be easily integrated now into our systems. What many people don't know is that the platforms that are used to perform the primary HPV screening that are FDA approved, are actually the same platforms that hospitals used to do COVID-19 testing. So many hospitals actually already have the lab infrastructure in place that we can move forward with this testing.