ideasIdea
Public data-quality scorecards for every cancer centre
Publish a simple report card showing how complete, timely and standard each hospital's cancer data are, so poor recording becomes visible and fixable.
Data quality is invisible and therefore unmanaged. A public scorecard per centre (completeness of stage and biomarkers, timeliness of submission, mCODE conformance, outcome capture) published quarterly by the registry or payer would create reputational pressure and allow improvement to be tracked, in the same way that hospital quality dashboards changed surgical mortality reporting.
Hypothesis
Public scorecards will raise stage completeness and timeliness in the bottom quartile of centres by at least 20 percentage points within two years.
Rationale
Public reporting of surgical outcomes (New York cardiac surgery, UK cardiac surgery) improved performance through attention and peer comparison; data quality is more directly controllable by the centre than clinical outcomes.
What would test it
Publish scorecards for centres in one region; compare completeness trends with a region receiving the same metrics privately.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.
- Weak real-world evidence and registries · We do not reliably know what happens to patients after approval, so we cannot tell which drugs deliver in practice.
Pages like this
not linked directly; found by shared links- IdeaA national cancer data space with one legal front door
- IdeaNo mCODE, no payment: tie oncology reimbursement to a minimal structured record
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- IdeaSend the code to the data: a federated analytics network of cancer centres
- IdeaA national late-effects registry linking treatment exposures to outcomes decades later
- IdeaA global federated real-world evidence network at regulatory grade
- IdeaAn international consortium pooling the outcome of every treated child with cancer