CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

BACKGROUND Cancer data collection is a hard and time consuming task in Argentina where data management and archiving practices in the Health System are highly heterogeneous. This problem was attacked by designing a new software prototype in order that all sources in the Bahía Blanca Cancer Registry area can have a uniform way of keeping cancer data. METHODS The prototype, named CDC (Cancer Data Collector), was developed with the goal of maintaining a strong compatibility with CANREG, which is central to allow an efficient management of cancer cases collections coming from different sources. RESULTS During 2012, the CDC was presented to Hospitals and Clinics Directors, Heads of Pathology Labs, Radiotherapy Centers, Hematologists and Clinical Oncologists in order to show them the advantages of its use. After that, a beta testing of CDC was started in a few sources in order to evaluate its scope and limitations. This preliminary testing yielded to several changes and improvements. First, new functionalities were added to the data visualization, cross-searching and validation modules. Secondly, depending on the source, the data management policies required to support different ways of data entry. This situation required the definition of a new CDC version, which is actually under development. CONCLUSION The CDC allows us to import and export data in a safe way, becoming into a helpful intermediary that carries on data from the sources to the Cancer Registry. The experiences showed the relevance and usefulness of CDC, but also the points to be improved in future versions.