Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Cancer
Date Submitted: Feb 15, 2017
Date Accepted: Nov 24, 2017
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Toward Timely Data for Cancer Research: Assessment and Reengineering of the Cancer Reporting Process
Background:
Cancer registries systematically collect cancer-related data to support cancer surveillance activities. However, cancer data are often unavailable for months to years after diagnosis, limiting its utility.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to identify the barriers to rapid cancer reporting and identify ways to shorten the turnaround time.
Methods:
Certified cancer registrars reporting to the Indiana State Department of Health cancer registry participated in a semistructured interview. Registrars were asked to describe the reporting process, estimate the duration of each step, and identify any barriers that may impact the reporting speed. Qualitative data analysis was performed with the intent of generating recommendations for workflow redesign. The existing and redesigned workflows were simulated for comparison.
Results:
Barriers to rapid reporting included access to medical records from multiple facilities and the waiting period from diagnosis to treatment. The redesigned workflow focused on facilitating data sharing between registrars and applying a more efficient queuing technique while registrars await the delivery of treatment. The simulation results demonstrated that our recommendations to reduce the waiting period and share information could potentially improve the average reporting speed by 87 days.
Conclusions:
Knowing the time elapsing at each step within the reporting process helps in prioritizing the needs and estimating the impact of future interventions. Where some previous studies focused on automating some of the cancer reporting activities, we anticipate much shorter reporting by leveraging health information technologies to target this waiting period.
Citation
