Promoting Cancer Surveillance Workforce, Education, and Data Use

Description

The charge of the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) is to enhance national cancer data and statistics in order to help public health professionals understand and address the nation's cancer burden. Cancer is a reportable disease in all NPCR-funded states. Cancer registrars ensure that timely, accurate, and complete data are maintained on all types of cancer diagnosed and /or treated within a health care institution or within a defined population. Consequently, registrars at medical facilities (including hospitals, physicians’ offices, therapeutic radiation facilities, freestanding surgical centers, and pathology laboratories) and registrars employed by the central registries are actively involved in reporting accurate, timely and complete data. These data are then submitted annually to CDC by each NPCR funded central cancer registry, resulting in national cancer data that is dependent upon the cancer registrar workforce. A well trained, highly qualified workforce is critical to the success of NPCR and the value of all cancer data. The registry profession is small compared to other allied health professions (Health Information Management 40,000 versus Certified Tumor Registrars at 5,657). Lack of knowledge about the profession and available educational opportunities contribute to the small number of certified registrars. A limited job market results in a profession that must be promoted to recruit new cancer registrars and retain current ones. The 2013 NCRA/NPCR Workload and Time Management Study: Guidelines for Central Cancer Registry Programs supports earlier studies stating that the factor most frequently cited by informants as influencing the supply of cancer registrars was the lack of visibility of the profession.This NOFO will build upon the success of the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) by expanding opportunities to enhance registrars’ capacity, resources to support recruitment and retention and promote cancer surveillance data. Moreover, the iteration of this project will build upon the DP16-1605and the successes and lessons learned from that project. The strengthening of the cancer surveillance workforce in this project will bolster NPCR registries' capacity to comply with Public Law 102 – 515, the Cancer Registries Amendment Act, which requires the complete, timely and accurate reporting of all malignancies and benign central nervous system tumors.CDC has been moving to modernization of the cancer surveillance system with real-time reporting. One specific area is with childhood cancer. In 2018, The Childhood Cancer Survivorship, Treatment, Access and Research (STAR) Act was signed into law, encouraging CDC to enhance and expand the current infrastructure to develop practices to ensure early inclusion of childhood, adolescent, and young adult cancer cases in State cancer registries using health information technology (HIT). Success may depend on a cancer registrar workforce that is equipped with current knowledge. As we move towards more automation and machine learning, CTRs will be in high demand to review and validate the findings (This is supported by Healthy People 2030, HC/2034- 4 Increase proportion of persons who use HIT to track health care data OR communicate with providers). A successful implementation of this project will contribute to this and other cancer surveillance rapid reporting initiatives.

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