Cancer Registry Operations and Data Collection
Domain 1 - Cancer Registry Operations and Data Collection
This domain tests the front end of registry work: finding every reportable case, deciding whether it belongs in your database, and capturing clean data from the medical record.
Core rules
- Reference date is the date your registry began case ascertainment. Diagnoses before it are generally not abstracted as new cases; later care must be evaluated against class-of-case rules.
- Casefinding draws from pathology, radiology, outpatient chemotherapy and radiation logs, disease indices, admissions, and death certificates. One source is never enough.
- Reportability follows ICD-O-3 behavior: /3 malignant primary, /2 in situ, /0 benign brain/CNS, and selected /1 borderline lesions per your standard-setter's list. Metastatic (/6) is not a new primary.
- Class of case: analytic cases are diagnosed and/or receive first course of treatment at your facility; non-analytic cases are seen only for recurrence, persistence, or subsequent care. Analytic status drives CoC and NCDB reporting.
- Abstracting captures demographics, tumor identifiers, stage, treatment, and follow-up. Use STORE/NAACCR data item definitions rather than local paraphrases.
Worked example
A hospital's reference date is 1 January 2018. In 2024, a woman with breast cancer diagnosed in 2016 comes only for annual surveillance. Reasoning: the diagnosis predates the reference date, and no first course treatment is delivered here. She is not a new analytic case. The registrar checks whether the facility reports non-analytic follow-up; she should not be accessioned as a 2024 breast primary.
Traps
- Abstracting a recurrence as a new primary.
- Missing cases found only in radiation oncology or outpatient infusion records.
- Confusing date of first contact with date of diagnosis.
- Assuming benign means non-reportable; benign brain and CNS tumors are reportable.