title: Quality control practices in centralized tumor registries in North America.
abstract: A survey of quality control practices was mailed to 73 central registries in the U.S. and Canada. The response rate was 88%, with respondents representing a wide range of registry characteristics and reporting strategies. While registries expressed different priorities in data use, 80% of respondents felt quality control data were important in the identification of problems. The most common method of quality control was acceptance sampling (used by 97% of respondents), and took the form of visual review, recoding and edit checking. Computer-based edit checks were almost universally used (95%). Process control methods of any sort were used by only 22% of respondents with less than 4% of registries reporting formal quantitative criteria. Sixty-one percent of respondents reported conducting one or more designed studies (e.g. reabstracting or casefinding studies) but only 20% of those made the results public. Greater emphasis should be placed on development of quantitative process controls, experimental design of quality control studies, and formal analyses and reporting of study results.
authors.affiliation: Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Division of Biostatistics, Miami, FL 33101.
authors.forename: S G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Hilsenbeck
mesh_terms: D002170:Canada; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms; D011786:Quality Control; D012042:Registries / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States