Do self-sampling kits for cancer screening herald a new trend in medicine? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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How can we remove barriers between people who need some medical interventions and obtaining them? One recent study showed the clear benefit of mailing self-sampling kits so women could obtain cervical cancer screening at home. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson says this is happening more and more often.

Nelson: There’s a whole collection of efforts afoot broadly across medicine that some people have called parsing. Where you provide easy solutions to certain problems. One might be that you make it easier for women to get ahold of oral contraceptives, so they don’t have to go through finding a doctor, which now takes forever, and getting a whole exam, where they can respond to some kind of prompt and get ahold of oral contraceptive pills. This mail in a kit doesn’t reduce your cardiovascular risk but it gets you screened for cervical cancer.  :35

Nelson says emerging and new technologies are fueling this effort, to the benefit of patients. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.