NEW YORK (360Dx) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded the College of American Pathologists a five-year, $300,000 collaborative grant to improve standardization and support for diagnostic cancer and biomarker electronic reporting.
CAP will collaborate with the CDC, the American Joint Committee on Cancer, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries on the standardization effort. The project is part of the National Partnership to Promote Cancer Surveillance Standards and Support Data Quality and Operations program of CDC's National Program of Cancer Registries.
CAP will focus on enhancing pathology cancer reporting and registry operations, including accelerating the development of technical solutions, such as Structured Data Capture (SDC), to improve the CAP electronic Cancer Checklist (eCC) report functionality in vendor systems. CAP will also use the grant to develop and publish the latest data entry content guidelines. CAP and other collaborators will work to encourage the adoption of new content and technical solutions.
CAP cancer protocols provide guidance for clinical and registry reporting of anatomic pathology, biomarker, and genomic findings and this data can be shared more easily using the eCC model. Starting in 2019, CAP cancer protocols will be released in the SDC XML format to improve reporting and data sharing between healthcare providers, researchers, and public health entities.
"We hope to continue to build upon recent innovations and successes to improve cancer reporting for the benefit of patients," CAP President Bruce Williams said in a statement.