Medscape recently published on story on the topic of whether or not it's worth the effort to follow cancer patients over many years to catch tumors that recur, improve outcomes, even reveal important trends. Those long-term cancer follow-ups require extensive human resources and will inevitably decrease over time.
One of the experts interviewed for the story was Tammy Holm, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at the UC College of Medicine. The article focuses on a recent analysis of lifetime follow-up data in the National Cancer Database (NCDB). The study, published October 24 in Annals of Surgical Oncology, evaluated the completeness of data collected between 1989 and 2014 and estimated the hours required to compile it.
Medscape wrote that when she and her colleagues are talking about the NCDB, it's usually "about how we would alter it to get more information."
