NCDB Survival Reports
The NCDB Survival Reports are provided to allow CoC-accredited cancer programs access to unadjusted American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage-stratified, five-year observed survival rates for all cancer sites. This reporting tool enables users to generate program-specific survival reports filtered by primary site of the cancer and diagnosis period. Computed results are available for cases diagnosed between 1994–1997 (AJCC 4th ed.), 1998–2002 (AJCC 5th ed.), or 2003-2004 (AJCC 6th ed.). Displays show overall and AJCC stage-stratified rates, including 95 percent confidence intervals. To facilitate local use and distribution, users are able to download reports to their computers in any one of the following file formats: Adobe Acrobat PDF and Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Survival Report User Guide (30K PDF)
Survival is a key factor for any cancer patient and the cancer programs that treat them. Increasingly, national groups are asking for the reporting of long-term survival information. While survival rates are intuitively a key factor in anticipating the consequences of a cancer diagnosis and treatment, they may or may not be a clear reflection of the quality of care provided by a physician or cancer program. Many factors beyond treatment affect overall survival of a patient, including the biology of the cancer itself and the overall health or comorbidity of the patient diagnosed with cancer.
Under the newly released 2012 CoC Accreditation Standards, the CoC specifically encourages programs to report many aspects of their program’s care directly to the public. The CoC offers a commendation for public reporting because it is clear that providing data to the public will enhance the reputation of the program, and will help in its efforts to continuously improve services and care provided to its cancer patients. Public reporting may include information on services provided, quality metrics describing processes of care, and long-term outcomes, and the CoC encourages programs to use the data available from the NCDB reporting tools in their reporting activities to achieve this commendation. To facilitate this use, the CoC strives to ensure that data available from the NCDB reporting tools accurately represents the care provided to cancer patients at CoC-accredited cancer programs and reflects the specific mix of cases seen and treated at these programs.
Prior versions of the NCDB Survival Reports provided comparisons between program types based on unadjusted overall survival. Comparisons using unadjusted survival could lead to erroneous conclusions based on the case mix of an individual cancer program. While this is certainly understood by professionals at our programs, reporting unadjusted survival outside oncology or to the public may communicate information in a misleading manner and result in seriously erroneous conclusions, mislead the public, or falsely advantage or disadvantage any one or combination of our accredited programs. Therefore, the NCDB Survival Reports have been revised to provide comparisons for each program’s survival data to the overall NCDB aggregate, along with statistical 95 percent confidence intervals for the program data and the aggregate. These data are still unadjusted and the caveats regarding case mix still apply. Updates to the NCDB Survival Reports can be expected, and will address this remaining issue.
With the increasing emphasis and interest in public reporting, the CoC has initiated a major project to develop risk-adjustment models for survival to further improve the value and quality of the survival data provided to its accredited programs. The CoC has empanelled a workgroup of leading authorities in the field from among CoC volunteers and experts outside the CoC to advise us on this work. These models will accommodate key patient and tumor factors beyond stage known to affect survival. The goals of this work will be to identify the best possible methodology for reporting adjusted survival data in as useful, transparent, and valuable a manner possible to our accredited programs.
The NCDB Survival Reports require a log-in, and can be accessed through the CoC’s Datalinks portal.
Revised February 17, 2012