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In 1997, Terri Pietsch, a medical-surgical nurse, began
part-time work as a cancer registrar and continued on when her
hospital merged with Cathedral Healthcare System (CHS) of
Newark, NJ in 1998. Three years later, when CHS sought funding
for a state-of-the-art cancer center on its St. Michaels campus,
only one of its four facilities cancer programs had received
approval from the American College of Surgeons (ACoS). Pietsch,
who worked at the approved facility, was named to the newly
created position of corporate director of registry services and
was tasked to bring the other facilities up to the standards
required for ACoS approval.
Integration
Each facility in the CHS network used a different registry
program that impeded integration. Pietsch met the challenge and
hired two registrars and soon had the IMPAC MRS® registry system
networked to the other hospitals, reducing the cost per case and
enabling cases entered from one hospital to be downloaded at the
other locations. “Being spared from re-entering information
enables a single person to manage what would otherwise be too
time-consuming,” notes Pietsch. “And what sold us on MRS was
that its representatives were local, not remote.” Since 2000,
CHS has had the same support representative, who also serves as
president of the Oncology Registrars Association of NJ. The
representative trained CHS’s registrars at their own facilities
and remains available for trouble-shooting even after the
installation of the expanded system.
Dependable Data
“The system is easy to use and dependable—there’s never been any
downtime due to the system,” says Pietsch. “But just as we
strive for continuity in patient care, we appreciate continuity
of care for our systems.” Data since 1979 is accessible from the
CHS database. Although one of the four hospitals has closed, CHS
can provide physicians with a patient’s cancer history if the
patient is seen at one of the remaining facilities.
The data are also invaluable for research and strategic
planning. CHS can measure its performance against national
benchmarks and evaluate its findings to identify areas meriting
increased attention and grant opportunities. CHS can compare
outcomes by stage of disease at diagnosis with all of NJ and the
rest of the country. Explains Pietsch, “We might discover that
one month we treated 49 lung cancer patients and 39 had no
insurance. Such data supports grant applications to serve our
largely underserved Hispanic and Afro-American patient base.”
Its registry program successfully addressed a CHS priority: When
surveyed in 2004 by the American College of Surgeons, all CHS
hospitals were given a three-year approval. |
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Cathedral Healthcare System of Newark, New Jersey
Terri Pietsch, corporate director of registry services |
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