CDC: a software to improve cancer data registration in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. First implementation experiences and challenges.

LASPIUR, ALEJANDRO; PALMA, VIRGINIA; LIONCAVALLO, PAMELA; CECCHINI, ROCÍO LUJÁN; PONZONI, IGNACIO; LAURA, EDUARDO

Buenos Aires

Encuentro; Annual Meeting of the International Association of Cancer Regitries; 2013

Instituto Nacional del Cáncer (INC) y Registro de Cancer de Bahía Blanca y International Association of Cancer Registries

The cancer data collection is a hard and time consuming task in Argentina because the data managment and archiving practices in the Health System are highly heterogeneous. Our Multidisciplinary Group attacked this problem designing a new software in order that all sources in the Bahía Blanca Registry area can have a uniform way of keeping cancer data. This new computational tool, named CDC (Cancer Data Collector), has been developed with the goal of maintaining a strong compatibility with the different components of CANREG. This feature is central to allow an easy and effective management at the time of cancer cases collection coming from different sources. The CDC tool enables us to import and export data in a safe way, becoming into a helpful intermediate step for connecting the route of data from the sources to the Cancer Registry. During 2012, the software CDC was presented to all Hospitals and Clinics Directors and Heads of Pathology Labs, Radiotheraphy Centers, Haematologysts and Clinical Oncologists in order to try to convince them about the advantages of its use. After that, a beta testing of CDC was started in few sources in order to evaluate the scope and limitations of the software in this first version. This preliminary testing yields to several changes and improvements in the software. In first place, new functionalities were added to the data visualization, cross-searching and validation. We also identified new modes of use in order to support the heterogeneous data management policies employed by the different sources. This situation requires the definition of an alternative version of CDC for allowing different ways of data entry flows. This new version is actually under development. In summary, the first experiences on the use of CDC tool show the relevance and usefulness of this software, but also the points to be improved in future versions.