Paper 4

Opening up Data Analysis for Medical Health Services: Data Integration and Analysis in Cancer Registries with CARESS

Authors: David Korfkamp, Stefan Gudenkauf, Martin Rohde, Eunice Sirri, Joachim Kieschke, Kolja Blohm, Alexander Beck, Alexandr Puchkovskiy, and H.-Jurgen Appelrath

Volume 26 (2016)

Abstract

Dealing with cancer is one of the big challenges of the German healthcare system. Todays eorts regarding the analysis of cancer data incorporate detection of spatial clusters as well as complex health services research and quality assurance. Recently, guidelines for a uni- ed evaluation of German cancer data were developed which demand the execution of comparative survival analyses [1]. In this paper, we present how the CARLOS Epidemiological and Statistical Data Exploration System (CARESS), a sophisticated data warehouse system that is used by epidemiological cancer registries (ECR) in several German federal states, opens up survival analysis for a wider audience. We also discuss several performance optimizations for survival estimation, and illustrate the feasibility of our approach. Moreover we present the CARLOS Record Linkage System CARELIS, a companion tool to CARESS that enables matching new data against already existent disease reports in the ECR under consideration of potential cross references.