Reducing Fear

While working in the breast center at a Houston hospital 15 years ago, Dr. Emily Sedgwick observed that when the facility’s doctors and their family members came in for a screening mammogram, they received their mammography results, as well as additional breast imaging and breast biopsies when necessary, on the same day as their screening appointment. Other patients, meanwhile, had to schedule appointments for those additional procedures and return to the hospital a few anxiety-filled weeks later. Believing that every patient should be treated like a VIP, Dr. Sedgwick, now with Baylor College of Medicine, implemented a same-day breast biopsy program at Baylor that has drastically reduced patients’ fears and worries around the mammogram screening process.