Background
The National Cancer Database (NCDB), under the guidance of the Commission on Cancer (CoC) leadership and committees, develops and disseminates aggregate and individual institutional reports for CoC-accredited programs. These NCDB reports have permissible and non-permissible uses that are predicated on the methodologies employed to generate the reports. Public reporting at the present time is not supported due to the absence of rigorous risk adjustment and audit validation against original records.
Purpose
This document describes guiding principles and permissible and non-permissible uses of the NCDB reports.
This document only pertains to the following NCDB reports:
- NCDB Hospital Comparison Benchmark Reports (HCBR)
- NCDB Survival Reports
- Cancer Quality Improvement Program (CQIP) Reports
- NCDB Rapid Cancer Reporting System (RCRS)
- Site by Stage Distribution Reports
- NCDB Completeness Reports
Other ACS documents describe the terms and conditions specific to the use of Participant User Files.
This document does not pertain to the use of data that is generated by the institution and not analyzed or reported by the NCDB staff.
Guiding principle regarding internal uses of NCDB reports
NCDB reports are primarily intended for internal use within CoC-accredited cancer programs and intended to be used for the purpose of evaluating and/or improving the cancer care that is delivered to patients at the institutional level. Individual program reports and aggregate reports and benchmarks are intended to be used for a variety of internal purposes including, but not limited to, advising improvements in practice management, multidisciplinary coordination of care and quality of care. These reports are also intended to be used as part of quality improvement, research and knowledge generation.
Guiding principle regarding external reporting of NCDB reports
New knowledge that is generated as a result of quality improvement and/or research activities using NCDB reports may be considered appropriate for sharing outside the institution when it is being communicated in order to enhance the general knowledge and understanding of cancer and/or facilitate adoption of improved practices and outcomes. In such cases, it is imperative that the methodologies and specifics of the quality improvement interventions and/or research hypotheses be provided as part of the external sharing. NCDB reports are not to be publicly reported or shared outside the CoC accredited program for purposes of marketing or branding.
Permissible Use of All CoC/NCDB Reports:
- Measuring, monitoring and improving cancer practices
- Identifying and reporting the need for cancer prevention programs
- Identifying areas for cancer screening programs
- Improving multidisciplinary coordination and timeliness of care
- Meeting standards
- Meeting and maintaining compliance with the Standards for CoC accreditation
- Quality improvement and assurance initiatives involving the cancer program and hospital (i.e. reporting on results of interventions)
- General education supporting cancer advocacy, medical education, and patient care
- Generating new knowledge through research
- Materials to support grant funding
- Reports on interventions
- Abstracts, articles, or chapters of scientific meetings, medical journals or books that utilize or present NCDB data
- Other reports derived from the tools to be distributed to internal staff and patients, including annual reports, public websites, community outreach brochures, and announcements of CoC-accreditation
Non-Permissible Use of All CoC/NCDB Tools:
- Local, state, or federal public reporting
- Benchmarking performance of one institution relative to national experience for promotional purposes and without documentation of methods and approach to data.
- Reporting of any data obtained from the NCDB Quality Reporting Tools for specific marketing purposes
- Reporting of any outcomes data including unadjusted and risk-adjusted survival and operative mortality rates calculated and reported by the NCDB.
