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Quality In – Quality Out
The motto of the cancer registry department at Prince William
Hospital (PWH) is “Quality In – Quality Out,” which represents
cancer registry coordinator Sheryl Goins’ determination to get
it right on the first try. “Ultimately, though, great credit
goes to IMPAC,” Goins explained. “What’s really helped me the
most is the extended edit checks that are built in and easy to
set up – it just takes a few button clicks to define the types
of edits that I want to use.”
PWH uses extended edit checks during current abstracting so that
quality or variance errors and warnings can be verified and
corrected prior to submission to the central registry and to
IMPAC’s National Oncology DataBase™ (NODB), a current source of
longitudinal oncology data that allows simplified access to
cancer demographics. Legacy data is also checked: when running
follow-up reports, Précis-Hospital’s basic edits can catch
inconsistencies that were entered even decades earlier, offering
the chance to populate fields that had not existed at the time
of earlier entries but were added in later years.
Responsive Customer Service
PWH was in the first group of Precis-Hospital users, launching
in November 2002. They have since received several upgrades,
each of which has improved their overall experience. IMPAC told
them up front that the product was written for and by certified
tumor registrars (CTRs). A unique approach, it was widely
applauded by the CTRs, whose intimate knowledge of the ins and
outs of cancer registry inherently qualified them as a perfect
focus group.
Goins took to heart IMPAC’s request for feedback. “I sent in an
enormous amount of suggestions one day, and my IMPAC
representative replied back that very afternoon. We prioritized
my requests into high, medium and low levels of urgency, and I
was informed that all were incorporated into IMPAC’s ‘wish list’
for changes to make for future releases.”
Précis-Hospital Improves Accuracy of
Regional Information
Voted the region’s #1 Hospital with the #1 Cancer Support
Group*, PWH is committed to quality care in the community. The
center’s use of Précis-Hospital further amplifies their efforts,
as the accuracy of what they submit to the central registry
increases the validity of the information that all area
hospitals share. This is no small deal, when considering how
patients frequently obtain part of their overall treatment at
neighboring facilities. So quality counts. Or, as Goins put it,
“If you’ve got quality, you’ve got consistency. When you’ve got
consistency, you’ve got accurate data. And that makes a
difference.”
* Manassas Journal Messenger, May 29, 2003 |
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