Increased operational efficiency within a cancer center can measurably improve patient care. Yet most cancer centers miss opportunities to achieve such increases – all because they lack access to the right data.
This article explores how cancer registries can be leveraged to power business intelligence - and enhance every aspect of your cancer center's operations. From enhanced care to higher trial accrual, this simple shift in how you think about registry data could transform your organization’s performance.
What is Business Intelligence, and Why Does Your Cancer Center Need It?
Business intelligence (BI) is a set of processes that leverages data to improve decision-making within organizations. While implementation will vary between organizations, BI programs share a few core elements:
- Centralized data from multiple areas of the organizations
- Enhance analytics to derive insight into the efficiency and potential improvements of key operational areas
- Decision support for leaders and stakeholders through visualization or streamlined action plans
The net result? Intuition and “gut feelings” are augmented by hard data that locates hidden opportunities, enhances planning capabilities, and delivers measurable improvements across the organization. But for cancer centers, it can deliver far more than just that.
Business intelligence in cancer centers has a direct impact on patient care and outcomes. From guiding clinical decisions to reducing registry backlogs, BI can help cancer centers combat resource limitations, staffing shortages, and the overwhelming growth of US cancer cases in the coming years. It can also help to identify opportunities to increase operational efficiency and optimize financial performance.
The only problem is how to overcome the barrage of data issues that most cancer centers face.
5 Challenges Cancer Centers Face with Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is only as useful as the data it is built by - placing a heavy emphasis on data quality, accuracy, and availability. But when building a BI program, cancer centers must contend with:
- Interoperability Issues: IT systems have usually been introduced piecemeal, with information often fragmented across multiple systems – and much of it even existing in unstructured formats like handwritten notes. This limits the accessibility and availability of data for BI programs.
- Compliance Concerns: Healthcare data is heavily regulated, and a single breach can lead to eye-watering fines, legal action, and even jail time. Cancer centers, therefore, struggle to ensure all data within a BI system is safe and secure.
- Data Accuracy: Cancer centers deal with highly vulnerable patients, and decisions can have a material impact on the length and quality of their lives. However, 55% of cancer cases are missing data – creating a clear vulnerability when using existing data sets as representative or instructive for care.
- Data Comprehension: Business intelligence requires extensive analysis to unlock insights hidden within complicated data. This demands data expertise, as many registries either do not carry in-house or simply underutilize, with many insights “left on the table” due to a lack of data comprehension.
For many cancer centers, these challenges feel insurmountable – forcing them to disregard the possibility of leveraging real business intelligence. But the reality is the solution to many of these problems is hidden within your cancer registry.
How Cancer Registries Can Power Business Intelligence
Cancer registries are an underutilized resource within cancer centers, but they are your most promising source of true business intelligence:
- Registries are already centralized within cancer centers, providing a single source for a range of important data points. Data is collected in accordance with the Standard Setters to ensure that the data is consistent for analysis and provides a single source of truth.
- Registries are staffed by ODSs whose skillsets are perfectly suited to analyzing data and generating business intelligence.
- Cancer Registry Data can overlap with many areas within the program where the ODS is positioned to assist with Quality Studies, Clinical Research, market share information, Patient Migration details, and many other areas.
However, there are a few key steps required to ensure your registry is a reliable and safe source for BI insights:
- Enhance Quality Assurance (QA): Eliminate data gaps and errors through more thorough QA. Our recent article explored several actionable steps you can take to improve QA processes and improve data accuracy within your registry.
- Centralized Unstructured Data: Roughly 80% of healthcare data is unstructured. Introduce tools that can gather and ingest this information – allowing your BI program to factor it together with structured data.
- Automate Analysis: Many of the patterns and insights within your registry data are difficult for a human to identify – but can be quickly retrieved by artificial intelligence (AI). Implement AI-driven tools that unlock these hidden insights to streamline your processes.
5 Ways to Generate Business Intelligence from Registry Data
With the right tools and processes in place, your cancer registry can deliver:
1. Operational Efficiency and Resource Management
Efficient resource allocation is essential for maintaining high-quality cancer registry operations. Data-driven planning helps the ODS utilize more of their data analysis skills and expertise. This may include:
- Improving accreditation management
- Expanding existing registry programs
- Collaborating with other departments within the cancer center
Along with many other high-impact practices.
2. Performance Benchmarking and Quality Improvement
Cancer registry data serves as a benchmark for healthcare organizations to assess their performance against industry standards. By tracking treatment outcomes and survival rates, institutions can:
- Compare performance across hospitals and healthcare networks
- Identify areas where patient outcomes can be improved
- Implement best practices to enhance the quality of care and patient survival rates
3. Research and Clinical Trial Optimization
Cancer registries provide a wealth of data that can support medical research and clinical trials. Organizations can leverage this data to:
- Facilitate patient recruitment by identifying eligible candidates for clinical trials
- Conduct feasibility studies to determine the viability of new treatment protocols
- Advance precision medicine by analyzing patient data to develop targeted therapies
4. Strategic Decision-Making
Registry data plays a crucial role in shaping strategic initiatives within healthcare organizations. By analyzing trends and gaps in service delivery, institutions can:
- Identify underserved regions or patient populations
- Expand service offerings to address emerging healthcare needs
- Enhance patient access to care through data-driven decision-making
5. Maintain Follow-Up Rates
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with cancer registry data can help forecast patient outcomes and enhance early intervention programs. AI-driven analytics allow institutions to:
- Predict trends in cancer incidence and patient survival rates
- Implement risk stratification models to identify high-risk patients
- Develop proactive intervention programs to improve long-term patient outcomes
Turn Registry Data into Business Intelligence with Inspirata
Inspirata’s suite of innovative software solutions are force multipliers for cancer data. Built upon industry-leading natural-language processing (NLP), our tools:
- Ingest structured and unstructured data to create a centralized source of information
- Analyze registry data to unlock a range of outputs - including high-speed casefinding, auto-abstraction of data, trial feasibility assessments, and trial matching
- Empower registrars to spend less time gathering and analyzing data, and more time pursuing other value-generating tasks
This is the key to unlocking real business intelligence within cancer centers – which is why our solutions are trusted by over 275 organizations across the US.
Want to explore how Inspirata could deliver measurable improvements to your operations?
