Hospital cancer registry

The hospital cancer registry records information about all oncological patients, having received treatment in a specialised medical establishment, for example, an oncological dispensary. It distinguishes the hospital registry from the population-based one, recording information on all cases of disease identified within a certain territory or in a certain group of people. Naturally, many patients (from 60% to 90%) receive treatment in the oncological dispensary nearest their residence. The information about these patients is stored both in the card file of the hospital registry of this establishment, and in the population-based registry of the given administrative territory.

However, it is necessary to remember that the sets of patients recorded in the card files of the hospital and the population-based registries are not identical! The hospital registry, along with malignant diseases, records non-malignant, borderline and some other diseases which do not get entered in the population-based cancer registry, but influence the assessment of the hospital activities (so-called non-profile patients). The population-based registry records also those persons who did not receive treatment in the local oncological dispensary (identified post-mortem or treated in a research institute, a non-specialised hospital, etc.). However, linkage of data of hospital and population-based registries considerably reduces the cost of running the population-based registry and improves the quality of its data.

The data of the hospital cancer registry are much more complete and reliable than ones of the population registry, as their source document are in-patient records , rather than abstracts, notices or other derivative forms. Therefore, the data of hospital cancer registry are used for clinical research, such as survival analysis of various patient groups (estimation of efficiency of various types of treatment, etc.). Information about the subsequent patient's state requires additional work on their follow-up or linkage with the population cancer registry data, which includes patient follow-up and regular examination.

It often happens that the number of malignant patients with a certain type and site of tumour, receiving treatment in a certain clinic, is not enough to generate reliable statistical results. Automated cooperative research using data from several hospital cancer registries allows us to achieve sufficient groups of patients with rare sites or types of treatment. This becomes possible only after wide introduction of the unified software, compatible at the level of data, dictionary codings, etc. in large oncological dispensaries. Development and wide introduction of the program package of hospital cancer registry is one of basic activities of Ukrainian cancer registry . It is an important step towards creation of a uniform oncological information environment and transition to paperless information technologies for data collection and analysis.

The automated package for hospital cancer registry (HCR) is currently being introduced or in operation in 11 oncological dispensaries of Ukraine. In total they contain information on over 150 000 patients. Only the Ukrainian Research Institute of Oncology and Radiology stores information on over 70 000 patients, having received treatment in the clinic of the institute since 1985 or, for certain types of diseases, since 1969.

The HCR system was developed for further exchange of data with the system of population-based cancer registry. It reduces the likelihood of information loss, occurrence of errors, as well as the costs of running the population-based cancer registry for those patients who received treatment in the given dispensary. The HCR program package was developed in the Laboratory of Medical Information Systems of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Oncology and Radiology and since 1991 has been maintained in the clinic of this institute. Since 1995 the system has been introduced in a number of oblast oncological dispensaries of Ukraine.

The blocks of data included in the hospital cancer-registry system are:

To receive more detailed information on the fields or contents in each block , contact the developers or see special documentation.

During development of the technology for the hospital registry, we tried to consider as much as possible the usual practice of statistical departments of dispensaries and used it to guide solutions of problems we faced.

Because an oncological disease is chronic by nature, it is important for the patient that we store all information on his previous treatments and use it when necessary. Therefore, data about all patient stays in the clinic are stored together, and information on subsequent visits is added to the previous record. This is equivalent to the paper technology of formation of the package of all in-patient records of a given patient when the information of the last stay is supplemented to it after the patient's discharge.