Older (ie, people aged 50-80 years), medically underserved adults are disproportionately burdened by tobacco use in the United States. These same individuals are at particularly high risk of poor health outcomes from COVID-19 because of their age and lack of access to care and the prevalence of tobacco-associated lung diseases. As such, preventive health care services such as lung cancer screening and tobacco treatment are fundamentally important to their long-term health. These individuals’ willingness and ability to engage in these preventive health services, however, were substantially threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians and health systems similarly grappled with when and how to motivate in-person preventive health services and were seeking guidance on how to make patients feel safe receiving in-person health care or seeking alternatives such as mobile health (mHealth) applications. We sought to identify methods to surmount the impacts of COVID-19 and systemic barriers to health care on the willingness and ability of older, underserved individuals to engage with preventive health care services.
