Collection Procedures

DATA PROCESS PROCEDURES AND QUALITY ASSURANCE

The FCDS presently collects new cancer cases from 248 hospitals, 246 freestanding ambulatory surgical centers, 100 radiation therapy centers, 500 pathology laboratories, and a number of specialty physician offices (i.e. dermatologists, oncologists, urologists, etc.) throughout the state. Reporting facilities and practitioners are to submit case abstracts electronically via the FCDS IDEA (Internet Data Abstracting Entry module). Once cancer cases are received by the FCDS, these cases are checked for accuracy and completeness regarding the cancer patient's demographics (i.e. full name, age, sex, race/ethnicity, marital status, address, occupation, etc.) and tumor information (i.e. the date of diagnosis, the method of diagnosis, stage, initial treatment, etc.) by performing inter-and-intra edits in agreement with the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) standards. All cancer records that have passed "checks and edits" are added to the master file and made available for health education, health intervention, and research purposes.

The FCDS conducts annually a Case Completeness and Data Quality Audit to assess case completeness and the level of data quality of the cancer abstracts submitted by reporting facilities and practitioners throughout the state. Complete and accurate data are necessary to estimate variations in population subgroups, and changes among population sub-groups over time.

For the Case Completeness and Data Quality Audit:

• Selection of a random sample of the reporting facilities in the State of Florida to be audited; this will represent approximately ten percent of all facilities.
• Selection of the number of cases to be reviewed using the selection criteria:  maximum between cases.
• The audit consists or casefinding (reviewing the source of the data) and re-abstraction (reviewing data compiled for the cancer abstract).