gms | German Medical Science

The quality of treatment of cancer patients depends more and more on optimal interdisciplinary cooperation. For more than 20 years comprehensive cancer centres have aimed at the continuous improvement of cooperation between different medical disciplines. As a base of quality assurance clinical cancer registries were established. Due to fractionation of the treatment process the continuous documentation of the complete disease data of a patient is limited. The organisation of patient data to flow back from outpatient doctors to the comprehensive cancer centre and the possibility to enquire vital status/cases of death from civil registries allows the calculation of the relapse free and overall survival times. The results are reported to the responsible hospitals thus enabling them to compare their efficiency to others on a regional, national and international level. In benchmarking, feeding back discrepancies, inducing considerations about possible causes and - if necessary – search for solutions are instruments for the optimisation of treatment. Prognostic factors and processes are assessed and their evaluation is fed back to all responsible colleagues. In doing this, medical competition will contribute to the optimized treatment of cancer patients.