Data Linkage for Optimizing Rectal Cancer Care in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionDespite good overall care in Alberta Health Services the local recurrence rates are higher than what is accepted as standard of care for rectal cancer treatment. There are variations in pre-operative staging, application of best surgical techniques and pathological grading, use of neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapies, and in clinical reporting. Objectives and ApproachWe aimed at reducing the variations through the design and implementation of a provincial clinical pathway for rectal cancer by 2018. Our approaches included: 1) multidisciplinary tumor board consultation together with physician education sessions in reviewing standards of care and quality metrics; 2) data linkage and analysis based on chart reviews and extraction of data from Alberta Cancer Registry; and 3) production of provincial reports and individual feedbacks to physicians. CancerControl Alberta and Cancer Strategic Clinical Network collaborated in the linkage and analysis of data as well as mobilization oncology physicians to the initiative. ResultsA review of a set of metrics for producing individual and provincial feedback reports to rectal cancer physicians. The set has 24 key quality metrics includes five, four, eight, and six metrics for radiologists, pathologists, oncologists, and surgeons respectively. Thirty-two surgeons have received individual physician feedback reports. Feedback reports for radiologist, pathologist and oncologist are being finalized with input from key opinion leaders in each physician group. Key impacts to the quality of rectal cancer diagnosis, treatment, and care between 2013 and 2015 include increases in use of rectal cancer pre-operative MRIs for curative resections (+23%), completeness of synoptic MRI reports for pre-operative MRIs (+21%), grade 3 TME of curative resections (+4%), and pathologic reporting of TME assessments (+2%). Conclusion/ImplicationsPhysician feedback report system will enable the Alberta rectal cancer community to sustain the results and address strategies to continuously enhance the quality of rectal cancer care and survival. We recommend ongoing annual dissemination of feedback reports to support continuous improvement of rectal cancer care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.111 | 0.210 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.031 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".