Efficiency Comes in Phases
Abstracting efficiency does not come retrospectively.Efficiency comes in phases and moves with the patient. For decades, cancer registrars have been trained to abstract retrospectively—waiting until treatment was complete to build a complete case in a single abstracting session. Despite increasing pressure from physicians and administrators to provide real-time information, cancer registries have continued to hold […]Are You Chasing Last Year’s Data?
Cancer programs cannot wait for data.Is your registry leading the transformation? Concurrent abstracting provides important and actionable data that everyone in the cancer program needs. Imagine the cancer registry providing KPI’s to a physician showing which patients started treatment within 30 days of diagnosis. Or an administrator quickly checking an online dashboard that alerts to […]
The Biggest Barrier is Your Mindset
The biggest barrier is not technology.It’s your mindset. For decades, registrars were taught to abstract retrospectively. Concurrent abstracting challenges that tradition, asking cancer registrars to work in phases, embrace automation, and to continuously update the cases in real time. And the resistance is real. Psychologists call it cognitive inertia: the brain’s bias toward familiar routines, […]Intelligent Abstracting is Not Optional
Intelligent abstracting is not a theory.It’s already happening. Concurrent abstracting is no longer optional—it’s essential. Many programs that continue to treat cancer registrars as end-of-line data collectors are falling behind. The solution is to deploy automation to transition cancer registrars into curators of data, processing more cases with higher accuracy and completeness in real time. […]Manual Abstracting Drains the Budget
Traditional abstracting drains budgets.It drains outcomes too. Traditional cancer registry abstraction—done months after diagnosis or treatment—creates bottlenecks, backlogs, could delay mandatory reporting, and produces stale insights. That delay is not just inefficient—it’s expensive. Concurrent abstracting rewrites the rules. By capturing data continuously, cancer registrars dodge the end-of-treatment scramble. The UCSF Cancer Registrar Workload and Staffing Study […]
Intelligent Abstraction
Manual abstraction is yesterday’s news.Real-time data demands smarter tools. Concurrent abstracting demands constant input from pathology, imaging, surgery, radiation, medical oncology, disease index, and EHRs. (Palis et al, Ann Surg Oncol, 2024). No manual workflow can keep up with the real-time demands of oncology healthcare today. That is why automation is the enabler. AI-driven intelligent abstraction […]