Review: What is Collaborative Stage (CS)?

Here is what we have learned from What is Collaborative Stage (CS)?:

• Cancer stage is currently collected using three different staging systems (TNM, SEER EOD, and SEER SS) with three different purposes and three different sets of rules; different needs exist for different agencies.
• Disadvantages of using three different staging systems exist, including:
  • Lower data quality
  • Duplication of effort
  • Extra cost and labor
• Collaborative Stage is a unified data collection system designed to provide a common data set to meet the needs of all three staging systems and provide a comprehensive system to improve data quality by standardizing rules for timing, clinical and pathologic assessments, and compatibility across all of the systems for all cancer sites.
• Collaborative Stage makes it possible for all registries to collect a unified data set and report to central agencies such as NCDB of ACoS, SEER, and NPCR of CDC.
• The structure of CS is adapted from SEER Extent of Disease Coding (EOD) using the AJCC 6th edition and SEER Summary Stage 2000, and the final T, N, M, Stage Group, and Summary Stages are derived by computer algorithms provided in the cancer registry software program.
• Collaborative Stage coding provides available data for staging TNM pathological, clinical, or mixed stage.
• Collaborative Staging codes describe the facts about how the T, N, and M were determined, based on coded levels of pathologic and clinical information.
• Collaborative Staging provides a structure in which data collectors can enter the facts that will generate a TNM Stage Group.
• There are fifteen items in the CS data set: in addition to five existing data items (tumor size, extension, and lymph node items), there are ten new data items including metastases at diagnosis, three "method of evaluation," and six "site specific" factors.