Navigating cancer registry management challenges
Despite the critical importance of abstracting and analyzing cancer registry data, organizations face significant challenges in maintaining their cancer registries.

All healthcare providers and entities that diagnose or provide the first course of treatment to a cancer patient are legally required to report case information to their state's cancer registry. Many healthcare organizations struggle to maintain timely data submission and cancer registry compliance, often due to insufficient access to certified tumor registrars, now referred to as Oncology Data Specialists-Certified (ODS-Cs). The Commission on Cancer has established strict guidelines regarding the type and format of data that ODS-Cs must enter into the registries; using unqualified or inexperienced individuals to submit data significantly increases the risk of errors and failing to meet accreditation requirements. In the realm of cancer prevention and treatment, data inaccuracies are more than a nuisance; they can cause real-world harm and prevent people who could benefit from life-saving therapies from receiving them.
Another challenge many hospitals and health systems face in managing cancer registries is the siloing of data across multiple systems and the locking of data in clinical free text due to manual documentation and electronic medical record (EMR) entry. While data from disparate sources is valuable in identifying drug candidates more quickly, the text-based nature of the data inhibits the process by making it difficult to analyze oncology data.

Unlocking the benefits of outsourcing and partnerships
Research reveals that more than half of clinical data management professionals need to be more confident in the quality or completeness of their clinical data from an audit and compliance perspective. Cancer data abstraction requires an extensive skillset and is a time-consuming process for the limited resources available at cancer facilities. As a result, many organizations turn to outsourcing, establishing key partnerships with data abstraction and cancer registry experts. In addition to lowering costs and helping ensure facilities meet accreditation requirements, outsourcing can help mitigate the impact of labor shortages while also alleviating the burden on existing staff.

When choosing a cancer registry outsourcer, organizations should prioritize those that focus on data abstraction best practices, compliance, and data governance. Equally important is finding a cancer registry outsourcer with a team of experienced ODS-Cs who can provide comprehensive registry support, including scalable staffing, registry data governance, case finding, abstracting, analysis, reporting, cancer program accreditation services, submission to national standard cancer registries, and data collection for special studies. Organizations should choose a partner whose ODS-Cs are trained and experienced in the use of audit tools to abstract and review data, as well as extracting data from a system's EHR to review each patient's entire treatment, including labs, x-rays, surgeries, and pathology reports, to compile insights and enter information into the registry software.

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