Welcome from the incoming NAACCR President, Eric Durbin

Dear NAACCR members,

It is a great honor to serve you and the cancer surveillance community as the incoming NAACCR President. First, heartfelt thanks to our outgoing President, Wendy Aldinger. Through her thoughtful and steady leadership, we have remained true to our mission. I also wish to express my gratitude to NAACCR Executive Director Karen Knight and all NAACCR staff who continuously perform their work with professionalism and exceptional grace and kindness. As we face unprecedented challenges to the funding for United States federal surveillance programs, the NAACCR community has come together to make clear the importance of cancer surveillance to the nation’s health.

I returned home from a truly outstanding conference in Hartford inspired and eager to engage with the community to chart a bold new path forward. Despite the funding challenges, or perhaps because of the funding challenges, there may be no better time to re-envision how we conduct population-based cancer surveillance. We all recognize that heavy reliance on manual data abstraction and processing may no longer be sustainable, and we must modernize our approach to cancer data capture. Transforming population surveillance programs to become more efficient, nimble, and resilient, while broadening the scope and value of registry data for public health, research, and clinical care will be essential for high quality cancer surveillance in North America to continue.

Four key areas stand out to me as the greatest opportunities to pursue transformative change in the way we conduct business:

1. The NAACCR data model should be revised to better reflect how the information evolves throughout each cancer patient’s journey. Details about screening, diagnostic testing, pathology, imaging, staging, treatment, treatment response, recurrence, and survivorship evolve in a variety of electronic systems over time. A more modular definition of the NAACCR record could facilitate greater flexibility in timely data capture and reporting to central registries. For example, it could be advantageous to capture cases in near real time from electronic pathology reports for early incidence reporting while enhancing registries’ ability to support research recruitment, including clinical trials.
2. Electronic health record (EHR) platforms continue to increase support for data exchange and interoperability. Capture of standardized core data elements directly from EHRs, such as those proposed by United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)+, will be a welcome advance towards more automated data capture from EHRs. Of course, this will require greater investments in direct EHR reporting to cancer registries and policies to support compliance.
3. Advances in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to assist in the abstraction and processing of registry data from structured and non-structured electronic data sources. Oncology data specialists should be empowered to use their intellect for decision making rather than transcribing existing data. AI models have already demonstrated a significant reduction in the need for human review of all pathology reports to assign site, histology, and behavior codes.
4. Registry data are more valuable than ever. Federal cuts to cancer surveillance programs run counter to the broad interest that I see in more timely and comprehensive cancer surveillance data. Registries are widely recognized as the sole source of truth in capturing the journey of all cancer patients in North America. Embracing the adoption of standardized data elements and supporting increased interoperability with international health data standards such as the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model, could increase the value and demand for high quality registry data. For example, the ability to natively generate registry data following the OMOP standards could attract new opportunities to fund registry infrastructure and operations by partners who need cancer patient data to develop, monitor, and evaluate new treatments.

While improvements in these four areas will be challenging and will require continued investments in personnel, innovative tools, security, and infrastructure, I am confident that the NAACCR community can work together to achieve these objectives in good time. I’m often moved by the generosity and willingness of our community to contribute time and ideas to move our mission forward. NAACCR itself is well organized to overcome the current funding challenges. I believe we are also well prepared to seize the moment to advance the field and ensure the long-term sustainability of our important work. As your new President, I welcome this challenge and I’m excited about what we will accomplish together.