NAACCR December 2023 Call for Data Update

NAACCR has completed the data quality assessments of the December 2023 Call for Data (CFD) Submission File. We will be releasing Certification results and other data assessments back to the registries through the CFD Portal by the first week of June. Updated statistics will also be released in June in CiNA*Explorer.

Registry Directors and staff affiliated with the registry will have access to Certification results and other assessments under the Data Assessment Section of the CFD Submission Portal. As in prior years, to see the Tableau visualizations, users will login via their MyNAACCR account. Users will also need to download a free Tableau Reader. The link is on the CFD landing page.

Certified registries will be recognized at the NAACCR Annual Conference in Boise, the fourth week in June 2024. Certification Certificates will be sent to the registries.

Diagnosis Year 2021 Completeness Adjustment

Historically, the NAACCR uses a five-year Incidence to Mortality Ratio (I/M) as the comparator to estimate expected rates to evaluate the current submission year by completeness. However, as expected, this method did not appropriately capture completeness of case ascertainment for the unusual 2020 diagnosis year.

On last year’s submission file, NAACCR, NPCR, and SEER applied adjustments to their respective diagnosis year 2020 completeness methods to accommodate the unique impact that COVID-19 had on medical care and, subsequent, cancer diagnoses. NAACCR and NPCR applied the same “self-correcting” method, and SEER applied a single adjustment percentage. This adjustment was appropriate for the 2020 diagnosis year only. NAACCR notified registries that the 2021 diagnosis year data would require separate evaluation for any potential adjustment.

This year, while diagnosis year 2021 cancer diagnoses are not dramatically lower due to pandemic related disruptions in medical care, all agencies once again applied an adjustment. A modification was needed because the standard completeness methods rely on past data to inform expected rates. Including the diagnosis year 2020 case count, which was dramatically lower than recent years and did not fully reflect cancer burden, underestimates the expected cases count and results in inflated completeness measures.

Therefore, rather than using the past five years in the comparator I/M ratio, NAACCR dropped the 2020 diagnosis year data and used only the past four years (2016-2019) for the NAACCR completeness calculation. NPCR also applied this method. SEER applied an adjustment to the 2020 data in their internal calculation. We will apply this approach for the subsequent four years, until diagnosis year 2020 is no longer in the standard completeness calculation. For example, for 2022 diagnosis year completeness, the I/M comparator will comprise 2017-2019 and 2021 diagnosis year cases.