Identifying Women at High Risk for Breast Cancer Using Data From the Electronic Health Record Compared With...

A barrier to chemoprevention uptake among high-risk women is the lack of routine breast cancer risk assessment in the primary care setting. We calculated breast cancer risk using the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) model, accounting for age, race/ethnicity, first-degree family history of breast cancer, benign breast disease, and mammographic density, using data collected from the electronic health records (EHRs) and self-reports.

Among women undergoing screening mammography, we enrolled those age 35 to 74 years without a prior history of breast cancer. Data on demographics, first-degree family history, breast radiology, and pathology reports were extracted from the EHR. We assessed agreement between the EHR and self-report on information about breast cancer risk.

Among 9,514 women with known race/ethnicity, 1,443 women (15.2%) met high-risk criteria based upon a 5-year invasive breast cancer risk of 1.67% or greater according to the BCSC model. Among 1,495 women with both self-report and EHR data, more women with a first-degree family history of breast cancer (14.6% v 4.4%) and previous breast biopsies (21.3% v 11.3%) were identified by self-report versus EHR, respectively. However, more women with atypia and lobular carcinoma in situ were identified from the EHR. There was moderate agreement in identification of high-risk women between EHR and self-report data (κ, 0.48; 95% CI, 0.42-0.54).

By using EHR data, we determined that 15% of women undergoing screening mammography had a high risk for breast cancer according to the BCSC model. There was moderate agreement between information on breast cancer risk derived from the EHR and self-report. Examining EHR data may serve as an initial screen for identifying women eligible for breast cancer chemoprevention.