Healthy Habits: Cancer Registry

In CHAMPS Oncology's latest blog post, i2o Case Study, Part I: The Role of the Cancer Registry, Joseph Castellano shares his thoughts on the topic.

With six months under his belt as the client relationship manager for CHAMPS Oncology’s cloud-based analytics system, insight2oncology® (i2o®), Joseph has had the opportunity to see i2o in action for clients and fully appreciate the unique information it reveals for cancer service lines across the country.

What even is the cancer registry?

When he began in this position, he knew cancer was a huge burden on the national healthcare system. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is the second leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for roughly 1,500 deaths a day and over $100 billion in healthcare care costs each year. What he wasn’t familiar with was the cancer registry - created to reduce the cancer burden in human populations by identifying determinants of cancer risks and improving outcomes. By tracking the course of treatments (on a grand scale) across multiple cancer diagnoses, the cancer registry is helping us get closer to finding ways to prevent, treat and eventually cure cancer.

So what can the cancer registry tell us about patients? 

Now that Joseph is well-versed in the cancer registry, he thinks of it as a detailed contact card for each cancer patient. For every person diagnosed, a Certified Tumor Registrar (CTR) meticulously follows the patient’s cancer journey for the remainder of their life, capturing important details about their diagnosis, stage, treatments, and outcomes. The more detail provided about the patient experience, the closer we can come to understanding best practices on a grand scale.

Where does i2o come in? 

insight2oncology was created to highlight the existing and past trends of hospitals, and hospital systems, as they search for ways to take decisive action to better serve their cancer population. In May, Karen Schmidt blogged about our Why i2o? animated video which succinctly addresses i2o FAQs we have become very familiar with answering. Today, Joseph is launching a series of posts that will detail the journey of a hospital system that uses i2o to identify problems, trends and outcomes to bring about necessary change for the health and sustainability of the entire cancer program across its three facilities.  

Stay tuned over the next few months for more on this informal case study!

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insight2oncology®, CHAMPS Oncology’s cloud-based system, transforms cancer registry data into actionable information to assist in the overall management of your cancer service line. i2o® provides a new perspective of your current market position and the unique insight to manage and improve your cancer service line. i2o allows you to collaborate with CHAMPS Oncology to analyze and interpret your cancer data in order to identify gaps, retain and attract patients, and make informed decisions with confidence. insight2oncology offers 100+ customizable reports containing dashboards and patient origin mapping in areas including migration, utilization, disease sites and community. For more, visitinsight2oncology.com.