NPCR-AERRO Hospital Operations Workgroup

Purpose and Goals

The Hospital Operations Workgroup was formed after the Strategic Assessment and Modeling Session (SAMS) held in Richmond, Virginia, in February 2006. It focuses on the automation of hospital health records and cancer registration processes as they relate to e-reporting.

Requirements Findings for Hospital SAMS, February 2006 [PDF-329KB]

The workgroup consists of participants from the February 2006 SAMS. The purpose of the workgroup is to—

• Develop and deliver the hospital module of the NPCR-AERRO model.
• Create a best practice use case for each cancer registry function identified at the SAMS.

The workgroup meets regularly to further NPCR-AERRO hospital operations activities.

Activities and Timeline

The workgroup is reviewing and revising diagrams, developing guidelines and recommendations for enhancing hospital operations to use electronic reporting and automation, and collaborating on the development of an implementation strategy. Below is a task list and work products of workgroup activities. This task list is updated as deliverables are finalized.

Modeling

Analysis and Design

Future activities include—

• Defining a list of data items to be submitted by each data source.
• Evaluating data items that can be pre-populated from the electronic medical record. Refer to the Hospital Abstracting Use Case for details.
• Developing a table of treatment data items and instructions for completion when no treatment is given, for example, chemotherapy treatments.

Success Story

Dr. Lynne Penberthy with the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Health System informed the NPCR-AERRO Team in a 2008 e-mail that as part of an effort to rearchitect the Automated Cancer Extraction system, the VCU team was able to document requirements for casefinding and abstracting by referring to the NPCR-AERRO use cases. Dr. Penberthy wrote, "... I am using a lot of the info from the AERRO documents. They really are excellent."