Coverage and data quality for the Lung Cancer Registry

Degree of coverage and completeness

All patients with tracheal cancer (ICD-10, C33) and lungs and bronchi (ICD-10, C34) in Norway should be included in the registry. Patients with the diagnosis lymphoma, malignant melanoma, sarcoma or mesothelioma in the specified locations are excluded from the registry.

All hospitals that diagnose and/or treat lung cancer are affiliated with the Lung Cancer Registry. All results on tissue samples are reported from the pathology departments of the Cancer Registry. The Cancer Registry's basic registry contains information on 99.3 % of all lung cancer patients.

For patients diagnosed in 2023, the Lung Cancer Register received 3,108 assessment reports. This amounts to a coverage rate of 94.3 % on a national basis.

The lung cancer register received 735 surgery notifications for the 735 lung cancer patients registered to be operated on in 2023. This corresponds to a coverage rate of 100.0 %.

The degree of coverage of clinical reports for each hospital is stated in the annual report.

Quality assurance of data is done as an integral part of the coding and registration process. In addition, the following examples help to ensure data quality in the Cancer Registry:

• Several independent sources report information
• The information is reported at several points in the course of the disease
• The completeness of the quality register is calculated and assessed through annual coverage rate analyses
• The employees have unique expertise in coding cancer cases according to the Cancer Registry's own code book and international coding systems
• IT systems have rules and barriers for illogical combinations, incorrect information and more
• The Cancer Registry of Norway conducts analyses and control runs that reveal inconsistency in the data
• Data extraction for researchers makes it possible to check a smaller data set of information that can reveal individual errors (e.g. incorrect entry of hospital codes) or systematic differences due to different interpretations of coding systems and rules
• The quality register annually performs a validity analysis where information on radiation therapy and drug cancer treatment registered in the Cancer Register is compared with information on radiation therapy and drug cancer treatment registered in the Norwegian Patient Register