Quality assessment and improvement of nationwide cancer registration system in Taiwan: a review

Abstract

Cancer registration provides core information for cancer surveillance and control. The populationbased Taiwan Cancer Registry was implemented in 1979. After the Cancer Control Act was promulgated in 2003, the completeness (97%) and data quality of cancer registry database has achieved at an excellent level. Hospitals with 50 or more beds, which provide outpatient and hospitalized cancer care, are recruited to report 20 items of information on all newly diagnosed cancers to the central registry office (called short-form database). The Taiwan Cancer Registry is organized and funded by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The National Taiwan University has been contracted to operate the registry and organized an advisory board to standardize definitions of terminology, coding and procedures of the registry's reporting system since 1996. To monitor the cancer care patterns and evaluate the cancer treatment outcomes, central cancer registry has been reformed since 2002 to include detail items of the stage at diagnosis and the first course of treatment (called long-form database). There are 80 hospitals, which count for >90% of total cancer cases, involved in the long-form registration. The Taiwan Cancer Registry has run smoothly for >30 years, which provides essential foundation for academic research and cancer control policy in Taiwan.

Incidence and survival of adult cancer patients in Taiwan, 2002–2012

“…In Taiwan, a nationwide cancer registry database has been established since 1979, and the data quality of the cancer registry database has been sustained at an excellent level since the enactment of the Cancer Control Act in 2003. 2 The Taiwan Cancer Registry (TCR) publishes national cancer statistics annually, including incidence, mortality, and distributions of treatment patterns for all cancer sites. After the long-form cancer registry database was set up to collect cancer staging information in 2002, 2 the distributions of stage at diagnosis for major cancers was recently published in the annual report.…”

Rituximab maintenance improves overall survival in follicular lymphoma: A retrospective nationwide real‐world analysis from Taiwan Cancer Registry Database

“…The hospitals with a capacity of >50 beds must participate in the TCRD. In 2012, the completeness of the TCRD was 98.4%, and 91.5% of the incident cases had histological or cytological verifications for the diagnosis of cancers 22, 23, 24. In addition, the National Health Insurance (NHI) system in Taiwan is a mandatory and single‐payer health insurance system, which has been operated by the government from 1995.…”

Are hospital cancer caseloads related to the validity of staging data reported? A lesson from National Cancer Registry in Taiwan

“…The data quality control indicators meet the IARC guidelines on completeness, and the accuracy of registration in terms of death certification only was 0.86% and that for morphologically verified cases (MV%) was 91.0% in 2010 (18).…”