OnCo
ideasIdea

A live national dashboard of stage at diagnosis as the scorecard for early detection

You cannot manage what you do not measure quickly. Publishing stage at diagnosis by cancer and region every quarter, not years later, would show whether detection efforts are working.

Registry stage data typically lag two to three years. Propose near-real-time staging capture from pathology and multidisciplinary-team systems feeding a public dashboard, with region-level early-stage proportions and route to diagnosis, so screening and symptom-pathway interventions can be evaluated within a year. England's Rapid Cancer Registration Dataset shows feasibility.

Hypothesis
Quarterly stage reporting with under six months' lag is achievable for at least 90% of cases and shortens the evaluation cycle of detection interventions from five years to under two.
Rationale
Fast feedback is what let COVID dashboards drive policy; cancer detection has no equivalent.
What would test it
Build in one national registry; compare completeness and lag against gold-standard registration.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
  • Most lethal cancers are found late · Screening exists for only a few cancers. Pancreatic, ovarian, liver, oesophageal and most lung cancers are found when cure is unlikely.
  • Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.

Connected

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Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links

fronts

1
Early Detection & Screening

terms

2
Stage shiftTNM staging

collections

1
SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results)

bottlenecks

2
Data silosMost lethal cancers are found late