LungSMART is an NIH Collaboratory Trial testing telehealth interventions designed to address barriers to completing lung cancer screening among patients receiving care in safety net community health centers in Utah. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends annual lung cancer screening for adults aged 50 to 80 years who are current smokers or who have quit within the past 15 years.
The first phase of LungSMART will test a combination of text messages, an interactive chatbot, and educational videos delivered by text message to increase patients’ participation in an eligibility assessment for lung cancer screening. In the second phase of the trial, the study team will use text messages, an interactive chatbot, and patient navigation by community health workers to increase completion of lung cancer screening by eligible patients who receive a referral.
Learn more about LungSMART, including the research team’s recently published bilingual formative evaluation of the study’s digital health tools. The study is supported within the NIH Collaboratory by a grant from the National Cancer Institute.
At the NIH Collaboratory’s 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting, we spoke with co–principal investigator Guilherme Del Fiol to learn more about LungSMART. Del Fiol is a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Utah’s Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. His co–principal investigators are Dave Wetter and Ken Kawamoto, also of the University of Utah.
“If we can show that [the intervention] works and it’s feasible, it could demonstrate a way to deliver lung cancer screening and shared decision-making in a very scalable way in a statewide implementation that could be generalizable to other community health centers across the county,” Del Fiol explained. “And it could suggest a type of care delivery that can be used for other problems as well, not just lung cancer.”
In the coming weeks, we will share more highlights from the 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting. Access the complete meeting materials.
