Pathology reporting to cancer registries: The evaluation of an electronic reporting system.

Description

Anonymized abstracted information from all pathology reports from January 1996 to March 2005 was obtained from the OCR. 35 sites were analyzed for the timeliness and completeness of pathology reporting.The study objective is to measure the distribution of timeliness and completeness of pathology reporting from centers across Ontario to the Ontario Cancer Registry (OCR), to determine how these distributions change over time, especially with the implementation of electronic reporting (E-Path) and to evaluate the timeliness and completeness of reporting against established quality targets.E-Path implementation was associated with improved timeliness and completeness. E-Path reports were received 3 times faster, demographic information was more complete and reporting volume increased by approximately 19%.Addressing the underlying causes for this unpredictability could lead to further quality improvement.Modeling of report timeliness and completeness demonstrated that E-Path implementation could be associated with temporary abnormal patterns in reporting and, while improved, the pattern of reporting remained unpredictable in several sites.

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