Every year, ONCO, Inc. attends the NCRA conference. Each year, we are reminded of how thankful we are for our clients. This year was no different as we welcomed their feedback, support, and suggestions. We heard many stories about registrar’s experience in leveraging their software to improve clinical quality, cancer registry efficiency and support accreditation. In fact, our favorite stories were about our clients being innovative and taking everyday tasks and elevating them to the next level. We hope that sharing our personal stories and experiences can help you while using ONCOLog!
We’ve connected with Theresa Hayden at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington. Theresa is a hands on, successful, innovative CTR who uses ONCOLog to help make her management of incomplete treatment cases more effective.
Q: Managing incomplete treatment cases in an effective manner is a challenge we all face as registrars. How have you confronted this challenge?
TH: We found it was too easy to code a potential treatment as ‘recommended unknown if given’ and forget to come back to update the information. Some abstractors had resorted to keeping lists of things they needed to recheck at a later date, but the same issues applied. Additionally, we found that with either method, abstractors weren’t rechecking and had no way to efficiently know which ones it was time to check. We opted for a KISS approach: We added two supplemental fields at the treatment level (see screen snip below). Anything that needed to be rechecked later would have two things entered: 1) A date when it should be rechecked, and 2) A short description of what needed to be checked.
Q: How has this impacted your workflow and improved efficiency?
TH: Workflow has been impacted by improving efficiency, improving completeness, and making it easy to QC what’s still needed on completed cases:
- Simplifying the process of noting when something needs to be checked after a case has been completed has improved the consistency of remembering to document what is still needed and has made it very easy to check if it’s time (or QC if it’s past time) to look for additional treatment.
2. Having a date field to tell us when to check has made it easier and less overwhelming for abstractors to stay on top of their Next Updates because they aren’t having to check everything they may be waiting on when some may not be due yet.
3. We added a second facility group to each abstractor’s “Cases to be completed” gather (see first screen snip below). This means their suspense list includes both what they need to complete and what they need to recheck during the current month without them having to carry out a separate process.
4. A third step we took to simplify our workflow was to include the next update fields on our default list each abstractor uses. In the screen snip below, you see a segment of that list. As you can see, it is very simple to tell which cases are on the list because it’s time to complete them (Suspense = 1 and the Next Update fields are blank), and which are on the list because it’s time to check for a next update (Suspense = 0 and Next Update fields are populated).
5. Lastly, our Next Update fields provide flexibility. Sometimes there is something waiting to be
resolved when a case is completed that isn’t treatment, as you can see in the sampling of Next updates shown below.
Q: Are there specific features in ONCOLog that made this easier to create and manage?
Yes. This would not have been possible if we were not able to create our own supplemental fields. We would not have been able to tie the fields back into the abstracting workflow as we have if we were not able to construct gathers with more than one facility group in them. The ability to create folders and subfolders for the GINS (gather instructions) also made this easier because we were able to organize these gathers within each abstractor’s own “Work To Do” folder. We could still have done it, but this helps keep everything more organized.
Here at ONCOLog we’re always looking to make the management of your registries easier and to that extent, we’ll be incorporating Theresa’s ideas in new product development meetings going forward. Stay tuned!
If you are an ONCOLog user and haven’t joined our Facebook Users Group or our LinkedIn Users Group, we encourage you to do so. It’s a great place for idea sharing and you never know, you could be the next registrar highlighted for a project you’ve worked on!
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