Quality control and improvement of cancer care: what is needed? 4th European Roundtable Meeting (ERTM) May 5th, 2017, Berlin, Germany.

Purpose: National Cancer Control Plans (NCCPs) often describe structural requirements for high quality cancer care. During the fourth European Roundtable Meeting (ERTM) participants shared learnings from their own national setting to formulate best practice in optimizing communication strategies between parties involved in clinical cancer registries, cancer centers and guideline groups.

Results: A decentralized model of data collection close to the patient and caregiver enhances timely completion and the quality of the data captured. Nevertheless, central coordination is necessary to define datasets, indicators, standard settings, education, training and quality control to maintain standards across the network. In particular, interaction of parties in cancer care network has to be established and maintained on a regular basis.

Conclusion: After establishing the structural requirements of cancer care networks, communication between the different components and parties is required to analyze outcome data, provide regular reporting to all and develop strategies for continuous improvement of quality across the network.