Dr Jem Rashbass, National Director for
Cancer Registry Modernisation based at the Eastern Cancer Registration and
Information Centre, spoke so fluently (and persuasively) that we found it hard
to put pen to paper except to note that the natural language query tool his
team have been using is TinQL (pronounced ‘tinkle’) – which converts natural
language queries into SQL – but we’ve been able to find precious little on this
tech on the web so perhaps we’ll follow that up with Dr. Rashbass and get back
to you.
He also stated that trying to get a
variety of institutions to provide data in a standard format on standard media
and with exactly the same variables is not a process with which he wished to
engage – so all of the processing is done very smartly at the receiving end and
ultimately a data feedback process ought to encourage some stepping up to the
mark by data suppliers.
The abstract for Dr. Rashbass’s talk
was:
“The National Cancer Information
Network is leading a change management programme across the English Cancer Registries
to implement a single National Cancer Registration Service by the end of 2012.
The NCRS is based on the Encore computer system and working practices of the
Eastern Cancer Registry and Information Centre (ECRIC) and delivers
near-real-time, clinically-rich quality assured information on all 350,000
cancers diagnosed in England. The Service will be run as a managed network
across the existing eight local cancer registries. Data collection by the
National Cancer Registration Service is covered by permissions from the
National Information Governance Board; patient-identifiable information is
available from nearly twenty different types of local and national information sources.
The Service infrastructure of the National Registry has been developed to
support a variety of national initiatives including the new national cancer
audits in breast and prostate cancer and the CRUK stratified medicine initiative.”
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