Abstract

Cancer is not only one of the leading mortality causes and disease burden worldwide but also the leading cause of death in Chile. There are various levels of development of information systems that collect and consolidate cancer data. In Chile, Hospital-Based Cancer Registries (HBCRs) are available in only nine of the 16 administrative regions, with a total of fifteen HBCRs nationwide. There is a need for implementing new HBCRs to gather information and implement strategies focused on prevention and early diagnosis. A retrospective descriptive analysis of the development process of an HBCR in a private cancer center in Chile was conducted, starting from a manual registration system to implementing a partial automated process, including a software development, data-entry profiles design, and the use of tools to capture and process data. The development of the HBCR-software took six months and has been operational for two years. A critical aspect was the design of the Unitary Database of Patients for each year, following a semiautomatic identification process to register probable cancer cases. Currently, the HBCR has 13,330 registered cases. Differences were observed in the total registering time of the incident cases per year, which decreased from 36 to 8 months on average, when comparing both methods, manual (ie. excel sheets) and semi-automatic identification (ie. software). The number of incident cases per year did not differ when using both methods. This is the first time in Chile that data-entry profiles consider data complexity during the registration process. The results support the hypothesis that registry of annual incident cases using a partial automated method, during the registration process, increases the registration efficacy, thus becoming a possible tool to implement on a nation-wide level.