Hospital-Based Registries

Hospital-based cancer registries maintain data on all patients diagnosed and/or treated for cancer at a particular facility. The focus of the hospital-based cancer registry is on clinical care and hospital administration. If you have taken a look at the brief history of cancer registries on a previous page, you may have noticed that the first cancer registry in the United States, Yale-New Haven Hospital Cancer Registry, was a hospital-based registry.

There are two sub-categories under hospital-based registries: single hospital registries and multi-institution registries. The primary goal of the single hospital (institution) registry is to improve patient care by medical audit-type evaluation of outcomes. Cancer data collected by the single hospital (institution) registry are also used for physician education, monitoring for compliance with evidence-based clinical guidelines, as a source of data for some types of research, resource planning and for some facility utilization assessment.

On the other hand, the primary goal of collective registries (multi-institution registries) is to improve patient care by supporting institutional registries with common standards and pooled data. They often seek to establish the natural history and etiology of the reported cancers.

The electronic medical record has enhanced registrars’ ability to retrieve and abstract data. Registry software developers are researching and using natural language processing (NLP) to electronically abstract pathology data and insert it into the registry software which will save abstracting steps in the future. NLP has demonstrated success in abstracting findings from imaging, abstracting cancer stage information and identifying breast and prostate cancers by descriptions in pathology reports. Structured formatting of data will enhance the ability of software systems to abstract key data.

Updated: December 11, 2023