2. Ongoing efforts to standardize reporting of cancer stage and comorbidity should receive a high priority and be fully supported.

3. Efforts to identify quality of cancer care measures should be coordinated with ongoing national efforts regarding quality of care.

Recommendation 2: Congress should increase support to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) to improve the capacity of states to achieve complete coverage and timely reporting of incident cancer cases. NPCR’s primary purpose is cancer surveillance, but NPCR, together with the Sur veillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program, has great po tential to facilitate national, population-based assessments of the quality of cancer care through linkage studies and by serving as a sample frame for special studies.

Recommendation 3: Private cancer-related organizations should join the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons to provide financial support for the National Cancer Data Base. Expanded support would facilitate efforts underway to report quality benchmarks and performance data to institutions providing cancer care.

Recommendation 4: Federal research agencies (e.g., NCI, CDC, AHRQ, HCFA) should support research and demonstration projects to identify new mechanisms to organize and finance the collection of data for cancer care quality studies. Current data systems tend to be hospital based, while cancer care is shifting to outpatient settings. New models are needed to capture entire episodes of care, irrespective of the setting of care.

Recommendation 5: Federal research agencies (e.g., National Insti tutes of Health [NIH], Food and Drug Administration [FDA], CDC, and VA) should support public-private partnerships to develop technologies, including computer-based patient record systems and intranet-based com munication systems, that will improve the availability, quality, and time liness of clinical data relevant to assessing quality of cancer care.

Recommendation 6: Federal research agencies (e.g., NCI, AHRQ, VA) should expand support for training in health services research and training of professionals with expertise in the measurement of quality of care and the implementation and evaluation of interventions designed to improve the quality of care.