QUALITY OF CANCER REGISTRY DATA - A COMPARISON OF DATA PROVIDED BY CLINICIAN WITH THOSE OF REGISTRATION PERSONNEL

The quality of cancer registry data is of great importance to the usef ulness of a cancer registry. To investigate the quality of its data th e IKL cancer registry (Integraal Kankercentrum Limburg) performed a st udy with the aim of comparing data supplied by clinicians with data co llected by registration personnel. Twenty clinicians reabstracted the information of a random sample of about ten of their patients, who wer e diagnosed with cancer in 1989 or 1990. After coding, the information was compared with the contents of the cancer registry records. For co mparison of agreement the information of 190 cases was available. The relative frequency of major disagreements was 0% for date of birth, 0% for gender, 5% for date of incidence, 6% for primary site, 2% for lat erality, 2% for histologic type and 2% for behaviour code. In general, the disagreements could be attributed to the handling of different co ding rules (incidence date), or to a lower level of precision by the c linician in comparison to registration personnel (primary site, latera lity). This study has shown that registration personnel are able to co llect data with a high degree of accuracy.