CANCER CARE
Mr Chris Carrigan, head of the National Cancer Intelligence Network co-ordinating team, speaks to NHE about recent data developments that herald a transformation in cancer research.
W
hile the National Programme for IT and associated digitisation of
patient records continues to struggle with delays, budget over-runs and renegotiated contracts, another NHS IT project is show- ing the benefi ts that well co-ordinated data can bring to patients and clinicians.
The National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN), set up nearly three years ago to make smarter use of the troves of cancer data being collected but not really uti- lised, is soon to unveil a “globally unique resource” bringing together data on every cancer patient in the country.
Mr Chris Carrigan, who heads up NCIN’s co-ordinating team, told NHE that the pro- ject is truly groundbreaking.
He said: “Within two years, there will be a very rapid, almost ‘real time’, notifi ca- tion and recording system for every cancer patient in the country, which will include hospital activity data, radiotherapy data, access to GP data, staging data from pa-
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thology, imaging information and more, all in one place.
“That will be a unique resource. There will be no-one else in the world anywhere close to that. That surely is groundbreaking stuff; it’s not sexy, but it will make a big differ- ence to how you run national audits, how you’re able to monitor services, how you’re able to examine treatment access and sur- vival and mortality information. We’ll be able to do that very much more rapidly, and drive a whole new set of initiatives.
“We’ll be able to track clinical trials for pa- tients from the point of entry onto the trial onwards, which is incredibly diffi cult for triallists to do long-term at the moment. It will give the opportunity for long-term follow-ups from clinical trials.
“It will let you drive a whole new set of data-based research projects, very much more rapidly. We’ll be in a whole new world in terms of what’s possible. It’s a huge potential resource.”
It will also involve a big change in data management, he said.
“We’re moving from retrospective colla- tion and interpretation to a ‘prospective’ process. Relying on the cancer registries as the focal point for new cancer diagnosis introduces a delay into the opportunities to analyse that data nationally, because de- spite being as timely as many other coun- tries, the registries are working 15 months beyond the end of the calendar year to have all the data completed. We then link that to HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) and cancer waiting times and so on, but at the moment, that’s done retrospectively to al- low us to do this complex analysis.
“The project we’ve got going at the moment is turning that completely on its head, and we’re implementing one single national processing system for all registries, which they will all use, rather than using their own individual systems then collating the data centrally. So we’re all moving now onto one physical shared system, which is
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