In this special edition of the This Week in Global Development podcast, produced in partnership with the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation, Devex co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins sits down with three architects of Kentucky’s transformation in fighting high lung cancer rates: Dr. Jamie Studts, Dr. Jennifer Redmond Knight, and Dr. Timothy Mullett — the team behind the Kentucky LEADS Collaborative and the QUILS™ system.

After a decade of data, the results are clear: earlier diagnoses are being seen in Kentucky, and current efforts are seeking a similar impact in Mississippi and Nevada. But the real story is how these results were achieved. Rather than imposing top-down protocols, QUILS™ works by equipping local community programs with data-informed tools, continuous feedback, and practice support — helping local clinics serve as trusted access points for lung cancer screening in their communities.

The conversation tackles the hardest part of scaling any screening program: human behavior. Lung cancer carries a unique stigma rooted in decades of anti-smoking messaging, and that stigma remains a powerful barrier, discouraging eligible patients from coming forward. The QUILS™ response is to replace shame and fear with empathy and hope, building person-centered care directly into clinical workflows so the burden does not fall on patients alone.

For global health leaders, the implications are clear: The barriers Kentucky faced — rural isolation, underresourced systems, cultural mistrust — are not unique to one region. They exist everywhere. And the infrastructure built to overcome them may be exactly what the world needs.

Visit Strengthening Care Systems — a series raising awareness of the scale of the global lung cancer burden and the systems-level changes required to address it: https://pages.devex.com/strengtheningcaresystems.html