Making Cancer Registry Data Meaningful & Marketable to Grow Your Oncology Program

The Cancer Registry is a vast knowledge center that can provide meaningful and insightful data to clinicians, cancer center and hospital administrators and other partners within the oncology world. The data provided can help grow and expand services offered at your facility as well as provide data for research and quality studies. It is very important to make it marketable!

What do I mean by that? We know the value of the data to our state central registries, SEER and the NCDB. But let’s take it one step further. Cancer programs today need to leverage this same data for administrative, marketing and financial planning, quality and research initiatives, community outreach and education. As Registrars, we hold the key to powerful registry data that can better your oncology program for patients, providers and the community.

Tips to Market Your Data to Program Decision-Makers

The following tips are categorized by audience and represents a small subset of the power within your registry data.

Administrative, Financial and Program Planning

  • Show the top cancer sites: Knowing this can help allocate financial resources for future planning, i.e. new equipment, screening programs, etc.
  • Analyze sites and their financial status: For example, compare site and stage by insurance coverage. If a patient is uninsured, they typically wait longer to go the doctor and may be diagnosed with a later stage. This information can help target a need for free screenings for these patients.
  • Analyze class of case: Look at class 00’s. These are cases diagnosed at your facilities but go elsewhere for treatment. This could lead to the need for new treatment equipment or the need for new cancer services.
  • Demonstrate market shares by zip code, county or state.
  • Look at In and Out Migration Patterns.
  • Examine data on hospital referred to: This can be done by site and will show the patients going elsewhere for treatment.
  • Analyze data by race, ethnicity and sex by site for screening programs and marketing.
  • Collect and report on: billing amount information, length of stay by site and admit class.
  • Provide information about cancer patients to administration for marketing or screenings by providing address, and phone information.
  • Target certain demographics for screening based on incidence reports run by race, ethnicity and sex.
  • Analyze treatment information to see what treatment modalities were performed at outside facilities by site.
  • Collect Diagnostic guidelines: Today this is not a part of the required data set, but it may soon be required. Assess if your facility is meeting national guidelines and performing all recommended diagnostic testing for quality care. Insurance reimbursement may be based on these guidelines in the future.

Hospital Administrators, Cancer Committee and Physicians

The following tips focus on mining data for Clinical Use and Outcomes Measures, essential to planning of services and making quality improvements.

  • Incidence reports can be run by site, sex, race, stage and treatment.
  • Compare treatment modalities by site and by physician.
  • Compare the treatment distribution of a select treatment modality. For example, compare the specific surgeries performed on any given site or radiation, chemotherapy, etc.
  • Analyze treatment by site for a particular stage at diagnosis.
  • Analyze Survival by Stage and compare to the NCDB benchmarks for the entire country as well as the state.
  • Survival by treatment can provide information on whether the treatment and care compares and measures up to what are being donenationally.
  • Look at the co-morbidity of the patients that did not receive the recommended treatment.
  • Use the data to analyze and compare quality initiatives with national standards.
  • Examine biomarkers and prognostic factors on the top sites: For example, PSA for prostate, ER, PR and HER2 for breast, etc.
  • Data can be supplied on recurrence: By site, stage, race, etc., as well as subsequent treatment for that recurrence.
  • Present all reports by individual physician.
  • Take advantage of any User Defined fields in the abstract, if available. Capture pertinent information needed at your facility that is not part of the cancer registry data set.
  • Collect data to comply with accreditation standards: COC, NAPBC, NAPRC
  • Collect and report on Clinical Trials; participation, type of trial, completion status, etc.
  • Utilize registry data fields and/or User Defined fields to help maintain COC compliance with certain standards.

With these tips, you hold the key to empower and growth both the cancer registry and the entire cancer program!

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