Beyond Pathology: Building an End-to-End Casefinding Workflow
As cancer registry data management continues to evolve, optimizing casefinding workflows is essential for improving data accuracy while strengthening efficiency and productivity. Pathology is often the first—and primary—casefinding source. Intelligent casefinding and AI-driven extraction from pathology can improve timeliness, reduce errors, and streamline day-to-day work. Pathology reports are well suited to automation because their structured […]
Perspectives on Registry Automation: Firestorm or Reality?
Recent perspectives on the adoption of AI to support cancer registry casefinding, abstraction, and analytics have landed differently across the community. The intensity of the feedback signals something important: a shared commitment to data integrity, accurate patient stories, and the long-term credibility of cancer registry work. To move the conversation forward, it helps to set […]
Closing Casefinding Gaps in Leukemia, Lymphoma and Multiple Myeloma
Automation sees what routine workflows miss. Real-time data turns “negative” into knowledge. The American Cancer Society projects 2,041,910 new cancer diagnoses in 2025, with hematologic malignancies accounting for 9.5% of all leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma cases. Roughly two-thirds of these patients will undergo a bone marrow aspirate biopsy as part of staging or diagnosis. Yet, […]
Symptoms Tell a Story
Myelofibrosis begins quietly. Your case finding practice makes a difference. Primary myelofibrosis often begins quietly — fatigue, anemia, maybe a larger spleen — until it becomes a diagnosis hidden in plain sight. For Oncology Data Specialists, catching those early signals in the record can mean the difference between “missed” and “found.” Spotlight on Myelofibrosis – […]
Close the Gap: Hematology
Clinical data tells the story pathology cannot. Roughly 8–12% of hematologic malignancies are clinically diagnosed rather than pathologically confirmed (Deppen et al., 2020; CDC USCS, 2025). Without deliberate data curation, they may never be reviewed or abstracted by the cancer registry. When medical disease indices (MDI) are pre-filtered and do not include all ICD-10 codes, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Close the Gap: Bladder Cancer
A symptom may be the first red flag.Bladder cancers often hide in plain sight. Bladder cancer cases surface from the inpatient and outpatient settings, each telling a story that pathology alone cannot capture. When casefinding workflows depend only on positive pathology, clinically diagnosed or recurrent cases are easily overlooked. Each omission distorts the cancer registry’s accuracy […]