CDC awards the College of American Pathologists five-year cancer reporting grant

Contact: Joe Schramm
Phone: 800-323-4040, ext. 7445
E-mail: media@cap.org

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awarded the College of American Pathologists (CAP) a five-year, $300,000/year collaborative grant to further address standardization and support for diagnostic cancer and biomarker electronic reporting.

The grant fulfills reporting requirements of the CDC’s “National Partnership to Promote Cancer Surveillance Standards and Support Data Quality and Operations of National Program of Cancer Registries.” To achieve goals of the grant, the CAP will collaborate with the CDC, the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR). For more than a decade, the three organizations have worked together on cancer reporting initiatives.

“We hope to continue to build upon recent innovations and successes to improve cancer reporting for the benefit of patients,” said Bruce Williams, MD, FCAP, CAP’s president. “As the leading organization of pathologists, we have led, in partnership with organizations like the CDC, AJCC, and NAACCR, the development of electronic reporting of cancer protocols.” 

In addition to maintaining and growing existing collaborations to enhance pathology cancer reporting and registry operations, the CAP will accelerate the development of technical solutions such as Structured Data Capture (SDC) to improve the CAP electronic Cancer Checklist (eCC) report functionality in vendor systems. Another key focus of this grant is the development and publication of the latest data entry content guidelines. The CAP Cancer Protocols provide guidance for clinical and registry reporting for anatomic pathology, biomarker, and genomic findings, and this data can more easily be shared with using the eCC model, which will be released in SDC XML format in 2019 and beyond, to improve reporting and data sharing between health care providers, researchers, and public health entities. 

To encourage adoption of new content and technical solutions, the CAP will work with CDC’s National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), NAACCR, AJCC, central registries, national standards organizations, public health entities, and other collaborators to increase awareness and maximize uptake. Further, the CAP will support activities to develop, disseminate, implement, and enhance data standards and best practices for improved clinical practice and operations of cancer registries in the United States.

As the world's largest organization of board-certified pathologists and leading provider of laboratory accreditation and proficiency testing programs, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) serves patients, pathologists, and the public by fostering and advocating excellence in the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine worldwide. For more information, read the 2017 CAP Annual Report at CAP.ORG.