Essentia Health Duluth adds robotic bronchoscopy, expands clinic hours for lung screening

The Lung Nodule and Advanced Bronchoscopy clinic at Essentia Health-Duluth added staff, extended appointment days and put a Noah Medical Galaxy System bronchoscopy robot into service to identify lung cancer earlier and shorten wait times for patients across the Northland.

Pulmonologist Eric Swanson framed the change as a move toward catching disease when it is most treatable. “Our goal with all of this is to find lung cancer at its earliest stages. So, we do screening, CT scans, so it’s done before someone’s ever symptomatic. You find it when it’s small, has the highest chance of cure,” Swanson said. Essentia also described the investment as a pair of significant steps to improve patient care by enabling biopsies earlier and in more treatable stages.

The Galaxy platform gives clinicians a tiny camera and robotic guidance to reach harder-to-access areas of the lungs and obtain biopsies with faster, more accurate positioning. “This device allows them to get a very tiny camera into harder-to-access areas of the lungs and perform biopsies with greater speed and accuracy,” Essentia materials and local reporting said. Essentia introduced robotic-assisted bronchoscopies to the Northland nearly five years ago; the new system and clinic expansion are intended to scale that work.

Access improvements include a new practitioner, Nurse Practitioner Lindsay Wallace, and a move away from the clinic’s previous model of seeing patients only on Tuesdays. Wallace emphasized the patient impact: “Having me in the clinic just really gives the opportunity. People aren’t going to have to wait as long.” Fox21 reported that historically “it’s taken months to years for them to get in to see someone,” and the expansion aims to diagnose nodules earlier and set care plans sooner.

Public-health context highlights why the changes matter. Wdio reported that national organizations note lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and that the American Lung Association attributes more than 124,000 deaths per year to the disease. Wdio also noted that “only 28% of cases are caught early, and just about 10% of eligible patients get screened, even though screenings can reduce mortality by up to 26%.” In Minnesota, Pat McKone of the American Lung Association said, “lung cancer is this second most common cancer diagnosed in Minnesota, and it is the leading type of cancer that results in cancer deaths in Minnesota.”

Screening eligibility guidance reported locally targets higher-risk people: Fox21 cited criteria including being between the ages of 50-77 with a 20 pack-year smoking history, noting that current smokers or those who quit within the last 15 years qualify. Wallace also highlighted stigma as a barrier: “there are studies that show that only 10% of the people that qualify for lung cancer screening are actually going through with getting screened. A lot of it, I think is because there’s a stigma around lung cancer of only smokers get lung cancer, that’s not necessarily the case.”

Wdio reported the clinic is “the only facility in the region dedicated to early lung cancer detection and treatment, and supporting individuals with abnormalities found during screenings.” For Northland and St. Louis County residents, the combination of added staff, expanded scheduling and the Noah Medical Galaxy System means faster pathways from screening to biopsy and treatment planning, a practical change that could shift more diagnoses into earlier, more curable stages.

What comes next for readers is practical: patients who meet screening criteria should talk with their primary care provider about low-dose CT screening and referral to Essentia’s Lung Nodule and Advanced Bronchoscopy clinic. The clinic’s expansions aim to reduce delays, cut through stigma and make earlier detection more achievable across the region.