Recap of the Cancer Registrars Association of New England (CRANE) Regional Meeting
October 16 – 17, 2017
Submitted by Nancy Sansone, BA, CTR – The Cancer Registrars Association of New England (CRANE), held their annual (regional) meeting October 16 – 17, in Groton, CT. For those of you unfamiliar with Connecticut, Groton is on the shore and is the home of Electric Boat, which manufactures nuclear submarines. It is also a stone’s throw away from Mystic, a historic whaling town.
The theme of this year’s conference was “The Challenge of Change” and there were several presentations centered on the upcoming changes in the AJCC 8th Edition Cancer Staging Manual. A primary focus revolved around changes in Breast Cancer staging and the impact of incorporating biomarkers into stage assignment and the subtyping of Breast Cancer into Luminal A, Luminal B, HER2 and Basal subtypes.
Dr. Frederick Greene spoke about the next big roll-out on the Commission on Cancer’s agenda with his presentation “FORDS to STORE: The Evolution of Cancer Registry Coding”. He discussed that the current FORDS manual (Facility Oncology Registry Data Standards) will morph to STORE (STandards for Oncology Registry Entry), with a targeted implementation of 2018. He had some interesting thoughts about future directions in the registry world, such as better recurrence data collection, better collection of clinical trial enrollment, and the possibility of synoptic reporting in radiology. He also speculated that the AJCC 8th Edition Cancer Staging Manual could potentially be the last manual that will be seen in paper format.
Additional highlights of the conference included: new officers of CRANE being installed, new CTRs were recognized, several states presented central registry summations, various prize drawings were available to attendees and April Fritz was fondly remembered and greatly missed. There was also a food drive to benefit a New London food pantry and the donations far exceeded expectations.
Registry Partners raffled two Visa Gift Cards at the confernece and we would like to Congratulate the lucky winners (left) Evin Soares and (right) Shannon Rego.
