SEER Goals & Research Activities

The goals of the SEER Program are to:

• Collect complete and accurate data on all cancers diagnosed among residents of geographic areas covered by SEER cancer registries.
• Conduct a continual quality control and quality improvement program to ensure the collection of high quality data.
• Periodically report on the cancer burden as it relates to cancer incidence and mortality, and patient survival overall and in selected segments of the population.
• Identify unusual changes and differences in the patterns of occurrence of specific forms of cancer in population subgroups defined by geographic, demographic, and social characteristics.
• Describe temporal changes in cancer incidence, mortality, extent of disease at diagnosis (stage), therapy, and patient survival as they may relate to the impact of cancer prevention and control interventions.
• Monitor the occurrence of possible iatrogenic cancers, i.e., cancers that are caused by cancer therapy.
• Collaborate with other organizations on cancer surveillance activities, including the CDC’s National Program of Cancer Registries and National Program of Cancer Registries (NAACCR).
• Serve as a research resource to the National Cancer Institute providing for the conduct of studies that address issues dealing with cancer prevention and control as well as Program and registry operations.
• Provide research resources to the general research community including a public use file each year, and software to facilitate the analysis of the database.
• Provide training materials and web-based training resources to the cancer registry community.

Research Activities

The SEER Program is also utilized by the NCI to conduct a program of special studies, referred to as Rapid Response Surveillance Studies, which address topical issues in cancer prevention and control. These studies may include the collection of additional information from cancer cases through surveys, personal interviews, medical record reviews, and/or the collection of biological materials. Research areas addressed in these studies include reasons for geographic and population differences in cancer patterns; the influence of occupational, environmental, sociocultural, and personal lifestyle factors on cancer incidence and patient survival, quality of life subsequent to diagnosis and treatment, and the diffusion into the medical community of the use of state-of-the-art treatments.

The SEER data have also been linked to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and this linked database is available to researchers. The linkage of the SEER-Medicare data is a collaborative effort of the NCI, the SEER registries, and the CMS. To link SEER with Medicare data, the registries participating in the SEER program send individual identifiers for all persons in their files. These identifiers are matched with identifiers contained in Medicare's master enrollment file. The linkage was first completed in 1991 and has been updated in 1995, 1999, and 2003. For each of the linkages, 93 percent of persons age 65 and older in the SEER files were matched to the Medicare enrollment file. NCI and CMS plan to update the SEER-Medicare linkage every three years, with Medicare claims for linked cases extracted in the intervening years. The SEER-Medicare data are available to outside investigators for research purposes.