Covenant Health’s Lung Cancer Push

A group of Lubbock-based pulmonologists may have a new phrase to coin: incidents happen. That’s because they are detecting early-stage lung cancer before some of their patients show signs of the disease.

The participating physicians are Benjamin Batson, DO, (Fellowship ’23, Residency ’20, Nursing ’07); Andrew Shakespeare, MD, (Medicine ’13); Ximena Solis, MD, (Residency ’21, ’18; Medicine ’15); and Brian Williams, MD, (Health Professions ’01). Their lung nodule clinic at Covenant Health in Lubbock, Texas, uses low dose CT scans to ensure small lung abnormalities are not cancerous.

The service accelerates the diagnostic process, meaning a patient does not have to wait weeks to get a nodule biopsied.

“It takes the patient’s concern, and gets them to us, so we can help make that determination and get them to biopsy as quickly as possible,” Batson says.

Scanning technology has become more widely used and readily available in recent years, reducing the time between detecting a concerning growth and determining whether it is benign. This is a great relief for this group, who usually diagnose lung cancer after the disease becomes more aggressive and symptoms are evident.

“Patients will get referred to me for a lung mass, and I look back two years ago, and they had a nodule. Now I’m telling them they’re Stage 3 or 4, when I could have told them they were Stage 1 then,” Solis says.

The earlier detection is also intended to bump a state trend. A 2025 Texas Medical Association analysis shows Texas ranked 46th in the nation for lung cancer screenings, and only 12% of high-risk patients are screened. This effort gives the group optimism — not because they are diagnosing patients with lung cancer, but because they are diagnosing it earlier in patients who otherwise would not have been screened.

Solis recalls one patient who visited the hospital because he fell off a ladder and had to get a scan —turns out he also had a nodule that was later diagnosed as cancer.

The group has screened more than 400 patients since the clinic opened in November 2025. With that comes the possible justification to expand the service.

“It’s exciting to be on the forefront of moving the needle toward early-stage diagnosis,” Shakespeare says. “Technology has made that possible; we didn’t have the option before.”