Cancer Registry
Memorial Cancer Registry is an integral part of the cancer program, ensuring complete, timely and accurate data collection on all patients who have been diagnosed and/or treated for cancer at Memorial Hospital of South Bend. The information collected provides researchers, clinicians and others the ability to offer the best treatments available, analyze outcome and end-results data and to assess clinical standards and quality of care.
For calendar year 2008 (the most recent year that complete figures are available) Memorial treated almost 1,200 cancer patients. Of these, 1,099 were Analytic cases, meaning that their diagnosis and/or first course of treatment was received at Memorial, and 98 were Non-analytic, meaning that diagnosis or first course of treatment was elsewhere. The number of cancer patients coming to Memorial for care is 30-50 percent larger than any other facility in our region, according to published reports.
Information collected by the Cancer Registry includes demographic (age, gender, race and residence), diagnostic findings, type of cancer, how the cancer was diagnosed, primary site of disease, stage of disease at diagnosis, treatment received and lifetime follow-up. This information is collected and analyzed by Certified Tumor Registrars.
The data collected is submitted to the Indiana State Cancer Registry as mandated by Indiana State Law. In addition, Cancer Registry as part of Memorial Regional Cancer Center is accredited by the American College of Surgeons, Commission on Cancer. The program participates annually in the submission of cases to the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB). The information provided to the NCDB is submitted without any patient identifiers.
The staff of Memorial Cancer Registry takes protected health information very seriously and extreme care is given to protect the information collected. The Cancer Registry is mandated by State and National regulations to follow strict HIPAA guidelines.