SEER*DMS Build CTC from Non-Abstract Records DCO/CFO/MDO/SHO

SEER*DMS can automatically build Patient Set and CTCs from non-abstract records including; death certificates, pathology reports, and other casefinding (partial) records.

The SEER*DMS autobuild function may be used to generate a Patient Set and CTC either one record at a time through the editor or batched en-masse by year or by facility. Restrictions on autobuild for certain record types exist due to the nature of information contained in the different types of records.

For example; a pathology report contains more detailed information on diagnosis date, cancer site, and histologic type than a death certificate. A radiation treatment-only record may contain a lot of detail for treatment and diagnosis. Defaults values for all data items have been established based on the source of information and type of record. Any default value automatically assigned may be overridden during standard visual editing.

There are four basic record-specific tasks for building CTCs from reportable, unlinked records. These tasks enable you to submit data to SEER or other sources despite the fact that a full case abstract is currently unavailable. To reduce the number of CTCs built solely from these records, it is recommended that you follow your registry’s Death Clearance and Casefinding procedures prior to executing any of these tasks.

• Build DCOs – build CTCs from death certificate records
• Build CFOs – build CTCs from pathology casefinding only records
• Build MDOs – use the SEER*DMS editor to build a CTC from a death certificate record using a specific set of defaults indicating that information was received from a physician.  Once the CTC is built, manually enter the additional information into CTC data fields. Defaults for treatment would be the same as the CFO defaults in order to pass edits.
• Build SHOs – build CTCs from short health records (partial abstracts, physician office, treatment-only, or other casefinding records stored in the Short Health Record format)

The premises of the autobuild function are:

• copy over all fields from the original record that correspond directly to items in the CTC and patient set;
• recode/derive CTC and patient set fields where possible;
• default to unknown value if field can’t be copied or derived from original record.

For example during autobuild, primary site and histology are copied over for a casefinding record and derived from cause of death on the death certificate for a DCO.

Defaults have been determined for fields in the CTC and patient set. Most defaults are the same for DCOs, CFOs, and MDOs. One set of exceptions is some treatment information where the default for CFO is all 8s but for DCO it is all 9s.

There are several spreadsheets which document the autobuild process:

• Collaborative Stage Defaults for DCO, CFO, MDO, SHO Builds. The default value is nine filled unless there is a value in the appropriate cell of the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet gives the schema name and site codes and then has a cell for each CS field. (Note that the schema is determined by both site and type, but only site is listed in the spreadsheet. Therefore, Kaposi sarcoma shows a 0 instead of the histology code. The site and type for each schema are listed in the CS documentation on www.cancerstaging.org.)
• Casefinding Only (CFO) Build Defaults. This documents the default values for fields and derived items other than CS (CS defaults are provided above).
• Proposed Site and Histology Default Codes for Cancer Cause of Death
• Proposed Death Certificate Only (DCO) Build Defaults This documents the default DCO build values for fields and derived items other than primary site, histologic type, and CS.

The MDO case will be built from the DC record and will utilize DCO and CFO defaults. Primary site and histologic type will be from the DCO document and the rest of the defaults will be from the CFO. Some treatment information, for example site-specific surgery for hematopoietic cases defaults to 99 only for DCO but is 98 for all others.

To reiterate, the Visual Editing Process should be used to verify that the values assigned through the autobuild process are correct. Following the build process, SEER*DMS creates an unassigned Visual Edit Patient Set worklist task for each Patient Set created or modified by the build. To find the editing tasks, enter "DCO Build", “CFO Build”, “MDO Build”, or “SHO Build” in the worklist Information filter.