Two of the country's eight regionally focused cancer registries began a pilot program in November that uses integration tools from InterSystems Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., to integrate, validate and manage information from hundreds of data sources for a rules-based system called Entente. The NHS Cancer Registry will use Entente to assess the outcomes of cancer treatments, study the impact of environmental and social factors on cancer risk, and evaluate cancer prevention and screening programs.

The Merseyside & Cheshire Cancer Registry and the Thames Cancer Registry will be evaluating InterSystems' Ensemble tools for the next three months, said Chris Carrigan, national coordinator for cancer registration. Ensemble includes an integration server, application server, object database and a unified development and management environment -- all combined in a single product for integrating applications.

The tools will be used to take data feeds from multiple sources and link them automatically to the regional registries and the NHS centralized registry, replacing much of the work now done manually to update registries, Carrigan said.

'The number of sources of data from which we would need to make a registration could be hundreds,' he said. 'It is virtually impossible to do high-quality, high-volume cancer registration by hand.'

Replacing many of the manual processes will help keep the registries more up to date, Carrigan said. There is currently an 18-month lag between the time a patient's cancer treatments begin and information about it is available in the registry, he said.