NPCR-AERRO Clinic/Physician Office Reporting Workgroup

Purpose and Goals

Traditionally, cancer patients received diagnostic testing, work-up, and treatment in hospitals. However, medical advances now allow patients to obtain care outside the acute care hospital setting.

Until recently, high-quality cancer reporting has been achieved primarily by hospital cancer registries and pathology laboratories. Data from other sources are not as consistent, leading to under-reporting of cancer types frequently diagnosed and treated outside the hospital setting. Melanomas and prostate cancers, for example, have been shown to be under-reported when central registries rely only on hospital reporting.

In many states, non-hospital data sources are involved minimally in reporting data to the central cancer registry. When reporting does occur, it may be through a manual process of identifying reportable cases and submitting copies of the medical record, or the central registry may send registrars to abstract the information manually from paper medical records. These processes are very resource-intensive, time-consuming, and vulnerable to errors in transcription. The need to use limited resources to access the data contained in clinics/physician offices* drives the effort to develop an automated electronic process to identify and report cancer cases using the clinic/physician office electronic health record (EHR).

The goal of this initiative was to move the cancer registry community forward in using consistent standards for electronic clinic/physician office reporting to improve the completeness, timeliness, and quality of cancer registry data by—

1. Implementing consistent electronic reporting from one or more medical clinics or physician offices to participating central cancer registries.
2. Providing guidance to central cancer registries and clinics/physician offices for implementing electronic reporting in their environments.
3. Providing the participating central cancer registries with new abilities to use clinic/physician office reports as a source of cancer information.

In 2012, this initiative resulted in the inclusion of cancer reporting as a menu option in Meaningful Use Stage 2. At that point, NAACCR created a workgroup to continue enhancing and supporting activities for cancer reporting from physician offices to central cancer registries, using a consistent standard that was adopted for Meaningful Use Stage 2 reporting.

*For purposes of this initiative, we are defining clinic/physician offices as any health care practitioner who is required by state regulation to report a cancer case to the central cancer registry.

Activities and Timeline

Modeling

Analysis and Design

Implementation