1. Building a cancer registry performance dashboard by leveraging existing workflow documents at a comprehensive cancer center
- Author
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Joseph O. Jacobson, Ingrid Stendhal, Jing Jing Wang Yakowec, and Hakim Lakhani
- Subjects
Cancer Research ,Process management ,business.industry ,Dashboard (business) ,Cancer ,Workload ,Plan (drawing) ,medicine.disease ,Cancer registry ,Workflow ,Oncology ,Medicine ,Center (algebra and category theory) ,business - Abstract
296 Background: Quantifying the performance of a cancer center’s cancer registry is important to plan for resources needed to address shortcomings and projected increases in workload. The objective of this project was to understand the workflow, reporting requirements, and existing documentation of the cancer registry at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in order to build a dashboard that quantifies monthly performance. Methods: Current state workflow maps were created detailing the three phases of the cancer registry’s operations: case finding, case abstraction, and case follow-up. Individual meetings and a workshop with the cancer registry staff were held to validate workflows, gather operational challenges and improvement ideas, and set performance metrics. Leveraging information already being collected by staff as part of their workflow, a database was designed to collect and auto-visualize monthly performance using Excel and Tableau. Results: The performance dashboard shows monthly trends of ‘on target’ status of the cancer registry’s case finding, case abstraction, and case follow-up efforts. It also quantifies how delayed the cancer registry is in case finding or abstraction and provides new case count trends by care facility, staffing capacity based on case load, and trends in lost to follow-up patients. One hundred percent of the performance dashboard data is from documentation already generated by the cancer registry staff on a routine basis. Data on monthly case load from September 2017 through March 2018 are presented in the table below; given a maximum limit of 86 cases to abstract per abstractor per month, the cancer registry is currently at more than full capacity. Conclusions: A well-designed cancer registry performance dashboard that leverages existing data does not add burden to registry staff and informs how best to manage and utilize resources according to case load. [Table: see text]
- Published
- 2018