Theresa Real, RHIT, CTR, Quality Control Manager for the Registry Partners Oncology Division attended the Pennsylvania Cancer Registrars Association Conference last week and was kind enough to share her experience at this amazing conference!
“The 42nd Annual PACR Educational Conference was held in beautiful Lancaster, PA September 28-30th with the theme Piecing Together Information for Better Outcomes of Cancer Care. Susan Brotzman and her committee did a superb job putting the program together with great speakers and interesting topics.
Some of the topics that were presented were an Update on Head & Neck Cancer by Dr. Karen Rizzo, Advances in Multiple Myeloma by Dr. Shyam Balepur, Immuno-Oncology: Seeking to Transform the Treatment of Cancer by Dr. Navindradat Ramcharran, and a presentation on new advances and treatment of melanoma by Dr. Marlana Orloff. Dr. Harold Harvey recognized all cancer registrars for their dedication to their profession and the patients and thanked them for all of their hard work. He presented an excellent discussion on breast cancer including the fact that the survival rate has increased in the last 15 years and the fact that new risk factors for breast cancer have been identified including BRCA1 & BRCA2 mutations, diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise and a diet high in fat.
Of particular interest was a presentation by Eliot Codner on Next Generation Sequencing-Translating Cancer Genomes into actionable insights. Mr. Codner posed the question to the group “Is your cancer registry collecting molecular biomarkers such as BRAF, ALK or ROS1?” We learned that NCCN Guidelines recommends broader molecular profiling for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). The broader molecular profiling is a key component in the improvement in the care of patients with NSCLC by identifying mutations for which emerging targeted agents can be identified.
Defensive Abstracting by Theresa Gerboc, CTR was a great reminder to everyone, from the most experienced to the novice CTRS, of how important good text is, not only for our own registry use & facility quality studies but also to our central registries. Strong text fields supplement the abstract in order to tell the patient’s full story and allow abstracts to stand alone.
Marilyn Hansen, CTR did an excellent presentation on SEER Summary and AJCC Staging review. She had everyone pull out their manuals and dust them off; reminding us all that CS is no longer being collected with cases diagnosed 01/01/16 and after and we no longer have a CS derived stage to rely on. More importantly Marilyn reminded each of us that we are responsible for providing the most accurate data as possible, that our data has an impact on each of the cases we abstract because those cases are not just names on an abstract, but rather represent someone’s mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother, uncle, cousin, husband, wife and significant other.”
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 Joseph Burkhart and Nancy Miller who were our raffle winners this year! We would also like to thank PACR for the opportunity to attend.
We look forward to next year’s annual conference which will be held in Wilkes Barre, PA October 4th – 6th, 2017.