Klin Onkol 2007; 20(Suppl 1 20): 77-95.
The paper examines the value of Czech National Cancer Registry (NCR) for the health care assessment. More than 1.3 millions of records collected since 1977 were audited from the viewpoint of comprehensiveness and correctness. The audit proved steadily increasing quality of NCR in time, diagnostic error rate (including wrongly unstaged cases) decreased below 6 % after 1990. Most recent
NCR records are therefore fully usable for the evaluation of health care results. For that purpose, reference data set with > 330 000 valid records was defined as a source of population standards for overall survival modeling. The reference data set is actual (it covers recent period 1995–2003) and clinically relevant (it contains only fully diagnosed and then treated patients). So called „Complete analysis“ of 5-yr survival was proposed as optimal for benchmarking of cancer centers against population-based reference. If the benchmarking should reflect survival experienced by recently diagnosed patients, the period analysis was proposed for such more up-todate assessment (Brenner and Gefeller, 1996). All calculated reference standards of overall survival are recommended for self-benchmarking of cancer centers. The values should not be applied for mutual comparisons of hospitals.
