Information for Health Professionals

Aim

MelCOR seeks to monitor the quality of care provided to people diagnosed with melanoma. The registry collects data related to initial staging and early treatment for patients with early melanoma (based on pathology data) in Queensland and Victoria. From these data, the registry can provide population-based information on patterns of care for melanoma patients and assess potential variations in health outcomes following a diagnosis of melanoma.

Participants

Participants are eligible to participate in the registry if they are:

Over the age of 18 years
Have a diagnosis of a cutaneous melanoma after data collection has started in their jurisdiction

Recruitment

Potential participants are identified via notification to State Cancer Registry by legislated channels already in place
The registry uses multiple types of consent during the data collection for various levels of data security. No identified data is collected without specific patient consent
Participants can opt-out at any time and request their data be removed from the registry.

Data Collection

Clinicians are not required to collect information. All information is collected from the relevant State Cancer Registry, which collects information through legislative channels already in place
The types of data collected include: demographics, diagnostic information, and treatment information
Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) will be developed and implemented, once the registry has matured. These assess overall health and quality of life as reported by patients at specific time points.

What are Clinical Quality Registries?

CQRs systematically collect data on a very high proportion of episodes of care relating to a patient’s diagnosis of a particular disease (e.g. melanoma), with the aim of improving patient outcomes through the assessment of the quality of care provided by healthcare providers and institutions.
Data is used to inform pre-determined, disease specific quality indicators (QIs) and participating sites are benchmarked using these QIs in regular reports.

What is a quality indicator?

Quality indicators are the aspects of care that are measureed to assess the quality of care of participants in the registry. Quality indicators are based on published evidence or agreed ‘best practice’ and have been developed by the MelCOR steering committee and other relevant stakeholders

Why is this project being conducted?

This registry has been established to improve both the quality of care and long-term outcomes of Australians with melanoma. Clinical quality registries achieve improvements in care primarily by informing health care providers how they are performing compared with others and against what is considered optimal practice. An understanding of such variation helps providers consider whether they should adapt their practice to comply more closely with clinical guidelines, where these exist.

Can clinicians access their registry data?

A clinicians may request data from MelCOR regarding a specific patient if that clinician is the recorded clinician associated with that patient
Note:Data provided back to clinicians will only be data that they already have access to by other means. Any additional data collected by MelCOR will be kept confidential, but may be provided for research purposes through a data access policy.

What types of data are collected?

The types of data collected includes: demographic (for both patient and provider), diagnostic information, and treatment information.

Please contact the MelCOR operational team (melcor@monash.edu) for more detailed information regarding what is collected.

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