Group Health has done more than 30 research studies on breast cancer since 1987. Our studies focus on:
- Finding factors that may affect a woman’s chances of getting breast cancer
- Finding ways to diagnose breast cancer sooner
- Increasing the number of women who have a good outcome after having breast cancer.
Group Health does two main types of breast cancer research.
- For some studies, we invite individual women to take an active role. If you take part in one of these studies, we will ask for permission to use information about you for research. This might include information from your health records or your answers to surveys we do for the study.
- Other studies involve all Group Health members. For these studies, we don’t look directly at any one person’s information. Instead, we combine everyone’s information before we look at it. For example, we count clinic visits, but we don’t look to see who made those visits.