Impact on Quality of Documentation and Workload of the Introduction of a National Information Standard for Tumor Board Reporting

Purpose: Tumor boards, clinical practice guidelines, and cancer registries are intertwined cancer care quality instruments. Standardized structured reporting has been proposed as a solution to improve clinical documentation, while facilitating data reuse for secondary purposes. This study describes the implementation and evaluation of a national standard for tumor board reporting for breast cancer on the basis of the clinical practice guideline and the potential for reusing clinical data for the Netherlands Cancer Registry (NCR).

Methods: Previously, a national information standard for breast cancer was derived from the corresponding Dutch clinical practice guideline. Using data items from the information standard, we developed three different tumor board forms: preoperative, postoperative, and postneoadjuvant-postoperative. The forms were implemented in Amphia Hospital's electronic health record. Quality of clinical documentation and workload before and after implementation were compared.

Results: Both draft and final tumor board reports were collected from 27 and 31 patients in baseline and effect measurements, respectively. Completeness of final reports increased from 39.5% to 45.4% ( = .04). The workload for tumor board preparation and discussion did not change significantly. Standardized tumor board reports included 50% (61/122) of the data items carried in the NCR. An automated process was developed to upload information captured in tumor board reports to the NCR database.

Conclusion: This study shows implementation of a national standard for tumor board reports improves quality of clinical documentation, without increasing clinical workload. Simultaneously, our work enables data reuse for secondary purposes like cancer registration.