Medical Laboratories

Traditional cancer data collection has been primarily from hospitals. As medical advances have occurred, diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers have moved from the acute care setting to being fully cared for within a physician/medical office and therefore was never received and counted by the registry.

Pathology laboratory reports are used to help identify cases that are missed in this routine reporting by providers/facilities. The purpose of this concerted effort is to alleviate under-reporting or a delay in reporting which can adversely affect incidence rates and research from incomplete data collection.

Medical laboratories obtaining specimen of human tissue which, upon examination, show evidence of cancer or other reportable neoplasms shall, within 10 working days, report the information to the NCCR.

This includes:

• Hospital-based laboratories
• Private laboratories, and
• Independent laboratories

The NCCR follows the volumes in the Standards for Cancer Registries published by the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries:

• Volume V, Pathology Laboratory Electronic Reporting.

Information about medical laboratory reporting may be obtained, free of charge, from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries at this internet address NAACCR Lab Reporting.

To streamline resources and workload the NCCR will move to an electronic reporting system and phase out paper reporting. The registry offers different electronic reporting options depending on your lab environment.

Options available:

Electronic:

• Synoptically Structured Health Level Seven (HL7) report.

Non-Electronic:

• Paper report submission. All cancer reporting forms must be uploaded to the registry Web Plus module.
• Excel report submission. All cancer reporting forms must be uploaded to the registry Web Plus module.

Please contact the registry by email: NCCR@health.nv.gov or by phone 775-684-5968 to initiate reporting. One of our NCCR representatives will contact you with instructions and resources to start reporting.

Medical laboratories who do not comply with the timeline schedule will be notified of the delinquency and asked for corrective action to be taken immediately, but no later upon 30 days of receipt of notification.

Any medical laboratory not in compliance with the notification may be asked to develop a remedial plan to bring reporting back into compliance.

The plan must include at minimum:

• A detailed overview of the root cause of the underlying delays in reporting, and specific action steps that will outline how the medical laboratory will address the issues to improve reporting timelines.
• Action steps could include, but are not limited to resource allocation, training and development, and process improvement measures. In summary, the medical laboratory at question will need to indicate how the plan will correct their non-reporting status and stay in compliance once the current reporting year has been completed, and compliance has been reached.
• At the discretion of the Cancer Registry Program Manager, the plan will be monitored and evaluated monthly.

If the medical laboratory fails to comply with the remedial plan, the NCCR will move forward to impose an administrative penalty as per NAC 457.145.