January 2024 Newsletter

Save the date for our upcoming educational webinar, What You Need to Know: Call for Data & v24 Changes. This one hour webinar will be presented by Amy Arnold, BA, CTR, Manager, Strategic Services, on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. An encore presentation will take place on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024.



Invitations will be emailed to clients the week of Feb. 6, 2024. CEU credits from NCRA are pending.

Often in this column, I discuss updates relating to specific malignancies that are collected in our cancer registries. Interventions that are frequently not codified are specific integrative medical strategies that are employed along with surgical, radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Along with these conventional approaches, music may be an effective therapeutic tool during cancer treatment to improve patient psychological and physical well-being.

Current research shows the positive effect of music on psychological outcomes; however, many of these studies lacked significant sample size and rigor in monitoring type of music used and duration of music use during treatment. A recent study included 750 patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy infusion. Patients were randomly assigned to either music (listen to music for up to 60 minutes) or control (no music) conditions. Music patients were allowed to self-select music from a single genre (e.g., Motown, 60s, 70s, 80s, classical, and country). Outcomes were self-reported change in pain, positive and negative mood, and distress.

Patients who listened to self-selected music during infusion showed significant benefit in improved positive mood and reduced negative mood and distress (but not pain) from pre- to post-intervention. The results indicated that music medicine is a low-touch, low-risk, and cost-effective way to manage patients' psychological well-being in the often-stressful context of a cancer infusion clinic. The authors suggested that future research should be directed to understanding what other factors may mitigate negative mood states and pain for certain groups during treatment.



Music as well as other integrative oncology technics may be important therapeutic initiatives to collect in our registries.

Make plans to join us for our upcoming webinar where representatives from ERS, a Health Catalyst Company, and HLA-Global, will provide an overview of the ground-breaking CRStar/HLA-Global Reportability Solution, the collaboration between two industry leaders that will provide cancer registries with a fully automated pathology NLP reportability solution for casefinding, addressing a key need for registries.

Invitations will be sent this week but mark your calendars now for Tuesday, January 23, 2024! We look forward to your presence at this exciting event!

We'd love to see you February 27 - 29, 2024, in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the tenth annual Healthcare Analytics Summit! HAS 24 is a world-class event with national keynotes, educational and inspirational analytics content, a five-star hotel experience, and more. Register now to save your spot!

The latest episode of the Cancer Registry World podcast is available now! In our January episode, Elliot Asare, MD FACS, Surgical Oncologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, joins Dr. Frederick L. Greene to discuss the role of cancer registry data in developing staging strategies for the 9th Version of the AJCC TNM system.

Previous episodes are still available on our website or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, including ApplePodcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio and TuneIn.

As we move into 2024 with anticipation and excitement, now is a good time to review manual processes to see where efficiencies can be enhanced and resources better utilized. We, at ERS, want to ensure that you are taking full advantage of some of the many features available.

What are your casefinding and follow-up processes? Are your employees manually searching through spreadsheets for reportable cases, then having to manually enter them into your database? Registry teams spend an average of 15% of their time on casefinding processes and then an additional 1.5 to 2 hours to abstract the cases. What if there was a better way to utilize your resources and free up time for other cancer registry initiatives and help drive concurrency in the meantime?

Automating these processes and integrating with any of the sources below will increase productivity, timeliness and efficiency in the cancer registry, as well as benefiting the entire health system and oncology service line. These data integration solutions are currently available from your health system’s source systems into the CRStar cancer registry database. Return on Investment (ROI) is quickly realized.



• EMR
• Pathology
• Medical Oncology 
• Radiation Oncology

Additionally, data can be integrated from CRStar to the source systems listed below to aid with many health system and service line initiatives.

• Data Warehouse exports
• Tumor Board solutions
• Precision Medicine solutions
• Patient Navigation solutions

If you would like to learn more about increasing efficiencies in the cancer registry, click below to set up a call with Melanie Rogan, ODS-C, Director, Growth and Strategic Services.

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