Theresa Real, RHIT, CTR, Project Manager for the Registry Partners Oncology Division attended the New York and Pennsylvania Cancer Registrars Associations Regional Conference last week and was kind enough to share her experience at this amazing conference!
“The 2016 Regional Educational Conference was held in gorgeous Fairport, NY October 12th-October 14th. This regional educational conference was a first time partnership between New York Cancer Registrar’s Association and Pennsylvania Association of Cancer Registrars. The collaboration provided very good presentations over the 3 days as well as an opportunity to socialize and network with our colleagues from the neighboring state.
Patrick Stevens, CTR presented Coding Reminders. One of his reminders was the interesting recommendation to record in Text when the patient is a twin (triplet, quadruplet, etc). By noting this fact in text it can eliminate confusion if the siblings both have a reportable disease. These siblings have the same date of birth, many times have similar names and can have social security numbers that might differ by just the last number.
There were excellent presentations by Dr. Eugene Toy on uterine sarcoma, Sandra Sabatka, LMSW regarding the oncology social worker’s role in the psychosocial support of the patient, Jocelyn Hoopes on cancer informatics, Dr. Melissa Loh on an overview of geriatric oncology, Dr. Kevin Bylund provided a presentation Innovations in Radiation Oncology Treatments and Dr. Eva Galka gave a very interesting presentation on gastric cancer.
Carolyn Ingram, CTR did several informative presentations. The first was a good discussion on hematopoietic diagnostic confirmation with examples of immunophenotyping and genetic studies as well as when to use clinical diagnosis as diagnostic confirmation. Carolyn also gave a presentation on AJCC and SEER Summary staging for lymphoma. She emphasized that extranodal and extralymphatic are two separate terms and are not interchangeable. Extranodal means the lymphoma is not arising from lymph nodes but rather in a lymphatic site such as tonsils or thymus. Extralymphatic means the lymphoma is arising in non-lymphatic organ or tissue such as lung or pancreas.
Of particular interest to me was Carolyn’s presentation Ensuring Excellence in Data Quality. She reminded us Edit-free does not equal Error-free! She also reminded us of the importance of our data and the need for quality data.
Dr. Dawn Riedy gave an outstanding presentation The Pathologist’s Role in Caring for Patients with Breast Cancer, sharing the step-by-step process of delivering a pathologic diagnosis. Dr. Riedy shared that at her institution if the surgeon provides the clinical stage to the pathologist at the time of resection, the clinical stage is included with their pathology report and the complete clinical & pathologic stage is provided by the pathologist including group stage thereby allowing the registrar to have a complete stage at the time of abstracting! ”
Along with our attendance, Registry Partners was proud to be a returning vendor for the PACR conference. Theresa had the opportunity to speak with other CTR’s and encourage raffle entries. We would like to congratulate Michelle Virkler from Lewis County General Hospital (left) and Donna Stevens from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (right) who were our raffle winners this year! We would also like to thank NYCRA and PACR for the opportunity to attend this wonderful conference!