October 21, 2025 / Last updated : November 18, 2025 Michele Webb Cancer Registry

Think Beyond the Obvious

The real challenge is finding what was missed. In an earlier post we explored how clinically diagnosed lung cancers often escape case finding. But the problem runs deeper: incomplete casefinding does not just miss patients—it reshapes the national picture of cancer itself. When symptom-based encounters, LDCT screening and imaging reports with ambiguous terminology, or clinical […]

October 21, 2025 / Last updated : November 18, 2025 Michele Webb Cancer Registry

Close the Gap: Lung Cancer

1 in 10 lung cancers are clinically diagnosed.Weak casefinding = missed cases. Roughly 1 in 10 lung cancers in the US are not pathologically confirmed, representing thousands of clinically diagnosed cases not collected in the cancer registry (SEER, 2025).  These cases may be overlooked if limited ICD-10 code sets are used that do not account […]

October 21, 2025 / Last updated : November 18, 2025 Michele Webb Cancer Registry

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 […]

October 8, 2025 / Last updated : October 8, 2025 Michele Webb Uncategorized

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 […]

October 8, 2025 / Last updated : October 8, 2025 Michele Webb Uncategorized

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, […]

October 8, 2025 / Last updated : October 8, 2025 Michele Webb Uncategorized

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. […]