A test of two interventions to improve compliance with scheduled mammography appointments.

Failure to attend scheduled appointments for mammography results in missed opportunities for breast cancer screening. We tested interventions to decrease mammography appointment failure among women attending the medicine clinic at a public teaching hospital. Consecutive women with mammography orders from October 1992 to November 1993 (970 women undergoing 1,072 mammograms) were assigned to one of three comparison groups: usual care, mailed reminder, and mailed reminder plus nurse counseling. The appointment failure rates were 25.5% in the usual care group, 20.3% in the mailed reminder group, and 19.7% in the special intervention group (p = .13). We conclude that mailed reminders modestly improve mammography appointment keeping by about 5%, and that nurse counseling has little additional effect.