Close the Gap

You can’t manage what you don’t count.
Missed cases silently erode credibility and performance.

Hospitals feel the financial and operational drag of delayed or missed case reporting long before it shows up in dashboards. The rationale, backed by research, is simple: every missed case requires extra work, delays reporting, and weakens quality, treatment outcomes, and value-based contracts that reward complete, timely, and coordinated care.

Here is the math: during a recent poll of registrars, they stated that delayed or missed cases typically take 1.5x the time and cost of a routine abstract. For example, 90 minutes abstracting time equates to 135 minutes abstracting time. Then, an hourly rate including benefits of $70 becomes $158 per case. Those extra 45 minutes inflate workloads, delay provider use of data, and negatively impact quality improvement work.

There are additional tangible and intangible hospital-level losses as well, such as: lost revenue, accreditation risk, credibility risk, and a distorted picture of the patient population. In CMS’s Enhancing Oncology Model, missed or untracked episodes will decrease shared savings or trigger downside risk. (CMS, 2025).

Cancer surveillance also suffers. Under-reporting to state registries impedes resource planning and equity analyses. When a hospital fails to meet their reporting requirements, State registries, who are also accountable for compliance, are unable to reach their federal mandates (NAACCR, 2024). SEER (SEER, 2023) underscores that timeliness and completeness of casefinding and abstracting are foundational to national cancer surveillance, clinical trials, and research.

Automation closes the gap. AI-driven casefinding accelerates abstraction, real-time data use, and streamlines end-to-end workflows.

Start today by quantifying your costs. Calculate the abstractor’s hourly labor rates plus benefits. Run the last full year’s accession register, create a comparative list of cases completed less than, and greater than, 6 months. Calculate costs. Determine the root cause(s) for the gaps. Develop an action plan to mitigate the problem. Prepare an executive summary and submit it to leadership for support. Then, deploy the plan and monitor frequently for results and outcomes.

Closing casefinding gaps protects accreditation, strengthens margins, and advances equitable, value-based cancer care. Capture every case, protect your program, and position your cancer registry and leadership team for value-based success.

First published on LinkedIn.

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