In November, two of the country's eight regional cancer registries began a pilot program using tools from InterSystems Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., to integrate, validate and manage information from hundreds of data sources.

The test is scheduled to be completed in three months. If the testing goes well, the technology will be used agencywide as part of an effort to assess the outcomes of cancer treatments, study the effects of environmental and social factors on cancer risk, and evaluate cancer prevention and screening programs.

The regional Merseyside and Cheshire Registry and the Thames Cancer Registry are testing the InterSystems Ensemble tool suite, which includes an integration server, an application server, an object database and a unified development and management environment, said Chris Carrigan, the U.K.'s national coordinator for cancer registration.

Multiple data sources

The regional operations want the tools to automatically link data feeds from multiple sources to their registries and to the NHS centralized registry. Automating the feeds would decrease the need for manual input and thus significantly improve the quality of the data, Carrigan said. "The number of sources of data from which we would need to [create a patient history] could be hundreds," he said. "It is virtually impossible to do high-quality, high-volume cancer registrations by hand."