Provider Attitudes and Screening Practices Following Changes in Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Guidelines.

<bold>Background: </bold>Changes to national guidelines for breast and cervical cancer screening have created confusion and controversy for women and their primary care providers.<bold>Objective: </bold>To characterize women's primary health care provider attitudes towards screening and changes in practice in response to recent revisions in guidelines for breast and cervical cancer screening.<bold>Design, Setting, Participants: </bold>In 2014, we distributed a confidential web and mail survey to 668 women's health care providers affiliated with the four clinical care networks participating in the three PROSPR (Population-based Research Optimizing Screening through Personalized Regimens) consortium breast cancer research centers (385 respondents; response rate 57.6 %).<bold>Main Measures: </bold>We assessed self-reported attitudes toward breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as practice changes in response to the most recent revisions of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations.<bold>Key Results: </bold>The majority of providers believed that mammography screening was effective for reducing cancer mortality among women ages 40-74 years, and that Papanicolaou (Pap) testing was very effective for women ages 21-64 years. While the USPSTF breast and cervical cancer screening recommendations were widely perceived by the respondents as influential, 75.7 and 41.2 % of providers (for mammography and cervical cancer screening, respectively) reported screening practices in excess of those recommended by USPSTF. Provider-reported barriers to concordance with guideline recommendations included: patient concerns (74 and 36 % for breast and cervical, respectively), provider disagreement with the recommendations (50 and 14 %), health system measurement of a provider's screening practices that use conflicting measurement criteria (40 and 21 %), concern about malpractice risk (33 and 11 %), and lack of time to discuss the benefits and harms with their patients (17 and 8 %).<bold>Conclusions: </bold>Primary care providers do not consistently follow recent USPSTF breast and cervical cancer screening recommendations, despite noting that these guidelines are influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]