On Jan. 31, Philadelphia’s Fox Chase Cancer Center announced that they will publish their cancer survival-rate data online, leaving some wondering if other cancer centers in the area — including Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center — will follow their lead.
But Abramson is unlikely to follow suit until they can account for the multiple variables that affect survival-rate data, Caryn Lerman, director of Abramson, wrote in an e-mail.
“The type of data that Fox Chase published can be misleading, because the survival outcomes are taken out of the context of clinical features of tumors, treatment, and other factors,” Lerman explained. Abramson does have a cancer registry and network for data collection, but would only make these numbers public “in a responsible manner that takes into account the analysis of variables that alter survival outcomes.”
Fox Chase is part of a growing number of cancer centers nationwide who are making this data available. “We are committed to helping the public become more informed when making decisions about their health care,” Michael Seiden, president and chief executive officer of Fox Chase, said in a statement. On the Fox Chase website, prospective patients can view survival charts for breast, colorectal, lung and prostate cancer at the four different stages of each cancer over the course of five years.
The data is from 1998-2002 and compares Fox Chase’s data with that of small and large community hospitals around the country based on statistics from the National Cancer Data Base.
“Part of the trend is to try to put more emphasis on outcomes and quality, and that’s a good thing,” director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics Arthur Caplan said. “But, there are real problems out there when publishing data,” he added. Because there is currently no agreed upon scale or template, hospitals can spin the data a little to make it look better, Caplan said. Without reaching an agreement on what to measure, “the data looks more like advertising then it does a way to compare between places.”
Caplan also thought it would be better to publish survival and outcome rates based on the doctor rather than the institution. “What you want to know if you have breast cancer or prostate cancer or some other cancer is, ‘how did my doctor do,’ not ‘how did my hospital do.”
