Beyond the Cancer Registry

posted by PAM Internet
on 27 May 2016

So, you’ve built your cancer registry and have populated it with as much patient information as you can drag from old systems and paper files. Hopefully you are keeping it up-to-date and using it to support such vital tasks as:

• Submitting cancer details to the national minimum datasets, automatically;
• General In-hospital reporting;
• Multi-disciplinary team meetings; and
• Surveillance of groups of patients, including two week wait time tracking

However, presumably there is a research element to the work of some members of your team. Do you know how to answer such questions as:

• A patient has undergone pre-operative radiotherapy before a major cancer procedure. Does this increase the chance of their disease free survival?
• Patients are beginning to undergo transanal total mesorectal excisions. Does this lead to enhanced recovery times and/or reduced healing problems?

Will your results be sufficiently resilient (statistically) to convince your research grant awarding authority and your peers? Presumably hospital statistical support is scarce and has long response times. We have prepared a paper on the analysis of data from cancer registries whereby, using proven statistical techniques, you can create:

Life Tables

Expectation of survival time without a pre-determined event occurring.

Log Ranking

Comparison of two or more Kaplan-Meier curves to determine the significance of a parameter on the predicted result.

We have already created such statistical analyses for some clients. Now we are adopting the use of an established open-source statistical package to enable us to produce more complex analyses faster and cheaper. Follow this link to see our more detailed paper on this exciting subject.