March 2023 Newsletter

Our Cancer Center Showcase continues this month with Cone Health, located in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. Cone Health is one of the leading health systems in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, continuing to grow tremendously. They have added two cancer care campuses to their Cancer Program within the last two years, making a total of six campuses that offer cancer care in the triad region.

The cancer registry is called the Oncology Informatics team, which better represents the work that the team does each day. The team is led by Joanne Essick, BA, CTR, the System-Wide Manager of Oncology Informatics. There is a total of six full-time and one part-time CTRs. The entire team works remotely with an administrative assistant on-site to help as needed. The team reports to the Oncology Service Line.

Eighty-seven percent of all annual cases are analytic with close to 5000 cases being accessioned annually. The cancer program at Cone Health has been Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) certified since 2007. The QOPI Certification Program™ provides a three-year certification recognizing high-quality care for outpatient hematology-oncology practices within the United States and certain other countries. Practices receive QOPI Certification based on their full compliance with the QOPI Certification Standards as assessed during an on-site survey.

When I trained as a surgeon in the 1970’s, almost all patients went to the operating room for a breast lump to make a diagnosis of cancer or benign disease, breast cancer was treated by radical mastectomy and neoadjuvant treatment was a distant thought! Essentially all diagnostic biopsies were surgical until image-guided stereotactic needle biopsy was introduced to select patients who needed to undergo therapeutic surgery (as opposed to the then-standard “diagnostic” breast surgery) for malignant disease.

Utilizing the same conceptual framework, several studies have recently been undertaken and published testing the hypothesis that image-guided biopsy can accurately identify patients with a pathological complete response (pCR) and subsequently where any surgery might be omitted. The MD Anderson multicenter trial for eliminating breast cancer surgery in patients responding to neoadjuvant systemic therapy (NST) has reached accrual. Patients on this study had initial T1/T2 N0/1 unicentric triple-negative or HER2-positive disease. Patients with residual disease after NST had standard surgery followed by radiotherapy, and those with a pCR did not have breast surgery. Although still early, there have not been any local, regional or distant recurrences in patients on the study.

The important questions, whether women with breast cancer and a pCR can avoid surgery and radiation after NST, can only be answered by keeping meticulous records regarding treatment that are found in our cancer registries!

Save the date for our upcoming educational webinar, Exploring v23 Changes. The 45 minute webinar, which has been approved for 0.75 credits from NCRA, will be presented by Amy Arnold, BA, CTR, Manager, Strategic Services at ERS and Yolanda Topin, MBA, CTR, Client Advocate Specialist on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 and Thursday, April 13, 2023.

The webinar will explore resources available for implementation of 2023 changes, familiarize participants with new and changed data items from NAACCR and STORE, and provide insight on best practices for ensuring accurate data conversion.

Invitations will be emailed to CRStar clients on Tuesday, March 28, 2023.

The latest episode of the Cancer Registry World podcast featuring guest Shirley Dalrymple, BS, CTR, RHIT, Coordinator of Quality Review, Cancer Data Services at the Levine Cancer Institute, is now available! She joins Dr. Frederick L. Greene to discuss importance of quality review in the cancer registry and strategies for improving registry quality.

The concept of QA review as an educational tool to assist with improving the quality of the abstracts is discussed as well as how EMR data can benefit registrars on a daily basis.

Previous episodes with guests Robert K. Brookland, Timothy W. Mullett, Catherine Bieker, Jon Patrick, Barbara Dearmon, Lejla Hadzikadic-Gusic, William Laffey, Rohit Nayak, Mellisa Wheeler, Lillie D. Shockney, and Karen Mason, are still available on our website or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, including ApplePodcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio and TuneIn.

The team at ERS is excited to participate in-person at this year’s 2023 NCRA Conference, May 8-10, 2023 in sunny San Diego, CA! If you aren’t able to visit in person, you can also find us in the Virtual Exhibit Hall!

Please plan on stopping by Booth #201 to learn more about ERS and our cancer registry management solution, CRStar, and how we can help your registry become an integral part of the patient journey at your cancer center … and more!

We’d also love to talk to you about our ongoing partnerships with Syapse, NurseNav, HLA-Global and OncoLens – partnerships that will help your registry become an integral part of the patient journey at your cancer center!

The March tip of the month focuses on the NEW CRStar Treatment Distribution report. This is a canned report that has been expanded with two new reports organized by site that show 1) treatment type and treating facility and 2) treatment type and treating physician. The new reports are in addition to the Treatment Combination and Treatment Distribution by Treatment Type.

Users have the option to select a population of their choice either by site, groups of sites or all sites within a given time frame or date range. Additionally, users may choose to display all treatment, regardless of the facility and/or provider or they may limit the report to select facilities within their database, as well as outside facilities and/or providers. Reports may be viewed and printed from the screen or exported to Excel for further customization.

Treatment options for comparison are (one or more may be chosen at once):

• Surgery (with the option of including or excluding Diagnostic and Staging Procedures)
• Chemotherapy
• Radiation Therapy
• Immunotherapy
• Hormone Therapy
• Other/Palliative Treatment

These reports are extremely valuable in order to show both administration and clinicians how the facility and staff are performing and where cases may be lost to other facilities and/or physicians. Above are examples of each report. For more information, please refer to the CRStar Resource Page and look under the Training section for Enhanced CRStar Reporting Module Tutorials for both written documentation and how to videos. A member of our support team is always available for assistance. Users may log in to the Support Portal at the link below.

Do you love CRStar?

So do we and we are offering our loyal customers the chance to earn a $200 gift card when a Cancer Program that you refer becomes an ERS customer!

Please click "Refer CRStar" below if you know of any Cancer Programs that could benefit from CRStar and the advantages that CRStar users enjoy and rely on.

Let's grow our CRStar community together!

Terms and conditions can be found on the CRStar Referral Form.

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