Coverage and data quality in the Prostate Cancer Registry

Degree of coverage and completeness

All patients with prostate cancer (ICD10: C61) in Norway must be included in the registry. The Cancer Registry's basic registry contains information on 99.7 per cent of all patients diagnosed with prostate cancer. The coverage rate for assessment reports for prostate cancer in 2022 is 90 per cent.

The Cancer Registry of Norway has had a strong focus on increasing the coverage over the past year, which has resulted in improved reporting to all quality registries. The hospitals themselves must wish to receive training in reporting. This presupposes that time, funds and personnel must be allocated. Registry managers have offered to visit relevant hospitals and provided training in what they needed. This has been both guidance in the use of KREMT (the Cancer Registry's reporting service) and cancer-specific reporting forms.

The degree of coverage of clinical reports for each hospital is specified in the annual report, see Results from the prostate cancer registry (Norwegian only).

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 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