National Cancer Registry Updates

National Cancer Registry Migration Project Bulletin

Welcome and Purpose.

Welcome to the web pages of the National Cancer Registry Migration Project Bulletin.  The aim of this bulletin is to keep the community and anyone else who might be interested informed about the developments in this change management project.  It is not a blog to foster discussion or a replacement for the planio project management environment – but a record of the existing, current and future activities.

The postings will be brief but frequent and cover all aspects of the development, training and implementation – a compilation of the latest month’s postings will also be sent out by e-mail to the UKACR members.

Jem Rashbass
National Director for Cancer Registry Modernisation
1/1/2012

Update 8 Feb 2012

IT – Software Development and Infrastructure:

Pre-migration tasks are ongoing: deduplication of patients and tumours; NACS codes; establishing a generic nhs.net email inbox for data receipt; pre-processing all data and providing databases for testing.

Registration:

Close contact is continuing between Trent, ECRIC and NWCIS over coding and database questions. 

Cases which would have previously been extra-regionals are transferred between ECRIC and Trent.  A new Quality Control report has been added to automate QC within ENCORE

Analysis:

The pilot ‘quick win’ analysis view of ENCORE data is now available for SQL querying.  Analysts both from ECRIC and Trent now have log-ins which allow them to access to this view.  Not all fields are available yet, but core values such as age at diagnosis, site, morphology, site and morphology mapped to ICD10 O2, date of death, and place of death are up and working.  Development is ongoing with other fields – the next step is to look at the treatment data and staging data.  We are working with the WMCIU to upload the Cancer Postcode Directory, enabling analysts to immediately access data based on postcode at diagnosis such as Local Authority and Cancer Network.  Also, the analytical view links to the main database, so other fields can be accessed even though they are not yet brought into the view directly.

Administration:

Final preparations are in progress for the Registration Conference (22-23 February).

Update 31 Jan 2012

IT – Software Development and Infrastructure:

1 in 10 of the tumours sent for Staging are now automatically redirected for Quality Control to check the coding.

Work has started on updating the system for COSD.

ICD-O-3 (2011) - and ICD 10 revision 4/O-2 for the purposes of back mapping - go live week ending 3rd February.

Registration:
West Midlands staff visited ECRIC for a closer look at EnCORE. They were able to cover the items on their agenda and this will be the basis for the next steps.

NWCIS registration staff received training in EnCORE from the Trent trainers. This went very well with everyone doing excellent work.
The first result from this training and follow-up is that the ability to include postcode to the SEARCH function is to be added. We are also looking at speeding up the manual creation of cases when processing paper path.

Update 24 Jan 2012

IT – Software Development and Infrastructure:
Preliminary work has started on the unified import of BASOX and CGREX screening data files.

YAML import mappings are being moved out of the codebase and into the database, enabling us to add a WYSIWYG mapping editor, removing the need to write YAML mappings by hand.

Analysis:

Cancer Analysis System:
Representatives from the NCIN and the UKACR analysis group met on the 17th January to discuss the Cancer Analysis System which will allow easy extraction and analysis of data from ENCORE. The meeting discussed the main features that the system needs to have to be fit for purpose, the long term goals and ambitions of the system, and the main challenges to implementing this. The minutes of this meeting will be written up into a document to be shared with all registry analysts, which will give an opportunity for further debate, comment and improvement at the next UKACR analysis group meeting.

Performance Indicators:
This round of the UKACR Performance Indicators provided ECRIC with an opportunity to quality assure and test the automatic calculation of the PIs. The ENCORE system has code that runs against the live database regularly to provide on-going monitoring of performance against the PIs. The results of this code are available for querying on the ENCORE website. Historical calculations are stored, so ENCORE uses can both see the current PIs and compare them with the state of the data previously, allowing them to monitor improvements over time. Now that the 2010 PIs have been produced for ECRIC, work is on-going to generalise the automatic PI calculations so all registries on ENCORE will have access to this functionality.

Update: 17 Jan 2012 - IT – Software Development and Infrastructure:

The migration test database has been moved to one of the new servers at the secure data centre, and now contains all the Trent data from 1966 onwards, as well as the latest extract of the complete NWCIS data set.

Database structure: restructuring of the holding tables for electronic source data in the Encore system has just been completed.

Distributed sysadmin: WMCIU are now helping with the system administration of the core Encore network infrastructure. This should help ensure a broad base of expertise and experience in these areas, increasing the resilience of the system.

Deduplication improvements: We have nearly finished a range of improvements to the patient deduplication tool in Encore.

An SOP for the pre-processing of data has been written and has been circulated to all Registry IT departments.

Registration: EnCORE is now moving to ICD-O-3 (2011 update) with automatic mappings
back to ICD10 4^th edition. 

Update: 4 Jan 2012 - Analysis view of Encore data

Work is progressing on the analysis view of the data on Encore.  We are piloting a 'quick win' version of this - thanks to the analytical team at Trent cancer registry for your work pulling together the list of key fields.  This will initially be accessible by SQL queries, and we'll also be talking to all of the analysts at other registries about which methods work best for them.

The analysis view will not only pick the main data items out of Encore, but will also provide derived fields in a consistent fashion, such as age at diagnosis, local authority, deprivation quintile, and whether or not the patient had treatment for their cancer.

Sally Vernon