An Innovative Approach to Improve Completeness of Treatment and Other Key Data Elements in a Population-Based Cancer Registry: A15-Month Data Submission.

BACKGROUND: In order to comply with the Louisiana legislative obligation and meet funding agencies’ requirement of case completeness for 12-month data submission, hospital cancer registries are mandated to submit cancer incidence data to the Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) within 6 months of diagnosis. However, enforcing compliance with timely reporting may result in incomplete data on adjuvant treatment received by the LTR. Although additional treatment information can be obtained via retransmission of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR)–modified abstracts, consolidating multiple NAACCR-modified abstracts for the same case is extremely time consuming. To avoid a huge amount of work while obtaining timely and complete data, the LTR has requested hospital cancer registries resubmit their data 15 months after the close of the diagnosis year. The purpose of this report is to assess the improvement in the completeness of data items related to treatment, staging and site specific factors. METHODS: The LTR requested that hospital cancer registries resubmit 15-month data between April 1, 2016 and April 15, 2016 for cases diagnosed in 2014. Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Basic script was used to link and compare resubmitted data with existing data in the LTR database. Data elements used for matching same patient/tumor were name, Social Security number, date of birth, primary site, laterality, and hospital identifier number. Treatment data items were compared as known vs none/ unknown and known vs known with different code. Matched records with updated information were imported into the LTR database and flagged as modified abstract records for manual consolidation. Nonmatched records were also loaded in the LTR database as potential new cases for further investigation. RESULTS: A total of 25,207 resubmitted NAACCR abstracts were received from 38 hospitals and freestanding radiation centers. About 11.1% had at least 1 update related to treatment and/or other data item; an average of 3.3 updates per updated abstract. The majority of the updates (45.7%) for treatment were changes from none/unknown to known value and 42.6% of the updates were related to radiation treatment fields. In addition, 172 potential new cases were identified. Approximately 10.5% (18 cases) of these new cases were confirmed to be truly missed cases after investigation. CONCLUSION: The 15-month data resubmission is a cost-effective approach to obtaining complete information on treatment and other key data items from reporting facilities and can also be used to identify potential missed cases.