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Barnes-Jewish Hospital (BJH), the teaching hospital for
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently
received a three-year approval from COC with commendation for
its cancer program. BJH not only received the coveted three-year
approval but is also the first institution to be surveyed as an
NCI Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The hospital regularly upgrades its systems, and in October
2000, BJH implemented IMPAC’s registry software to handle its
85,000-patient database. “We looked at other vendors, but IMPAC
was moving forward with a Windows-based software, Précis®,”
explains Lori Grove, CTR, Oncology Data Service manager, with 13
years in registry at BJH.
Generating Reports
For Grove, what is most important about Précis is its reporting
functionality. “Being able to run reports on just about anything
quickly is essential,” she says. “We receive at least a dozen
requests a month from physicians and other cancer center
administrators and use Précis to export the data they need for
grant applications, QA purposes, research papers, and planning;
our data provide a very precise idea of the scope of cancer
cases diagnosed and treated at BJH.”
Working Remotely
Putting Précis on Citrix SQL’s platform, which
BJH pioneered, allows the hospital to give its registrars the
option of working from home. After completing in-hospital
training, some registrars have chosen to work from home, which
for one is 50 miles away. “Once we got the process working
smoothly,” says Grove, “our ability to offer the choice to work
remotely has helped make us competitive in hiring and retaining
area registrars.”
Casefinding
BJH recently implemented an automatic casefinding procedure. All
patients registering at BJH with an ICD9 code indicating a
reportable diagnosis are captured weekly in a casefinding file
which is imported into Précis. Registrars perform casefinding
from this file; acceptance of a new case generates an accession
number, and all demographic data as well as date of first
contact and primary site information are automatically populated
from the hospital mainframe system. Cases determined to be
non-reportable or already in the database are then deleted from
the casefinding file.
Siteman Cancer
Center recently opened a new facility at Barnes-Jewish Hospital
St. Peters, and BJH Oncology Data Services is using Précis to
assist it with abstracting and state reporting of new cancer
cases.
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