Community outreach, stigma and underserved populations

As part of our mission to reduce barriers to screening, the Rescue Lung Society (RLS) developed a registry for CT lung screening (CTLS).  The registry will provide a repository of high-quality data that organizations can use to assess the quality of their screening program and to create performance benchmarks. This data warehouse will help inform future clinical guidelines in the US and globally.

The registry is available free of charge for RLS members. We expect that institutions and jurisdictions around the world, especially those just starting to implement CTLS, will benefit from joining the registry. There is a need for a high-quality data repository. Screening centers often don’t have the resources required to calculate quality metrics such as screening volumes, rates of intervention, positive predictive values, cancer detection rates, false positive rates, smoking cessation rates, stage breakdowns, and time to diagnosis. Eventually, we expect there to be a rich database to help inform best-in-class levels of CTLS quality indicators by region and by population. The registry will also help foster collaborations across institutions, regions and jurisdictions.

• There are several central goals of the RLS registry:
• Provide an affordable, user-friendly mechanism for health care organizations offering CTLS services to submit patient-level data to a global CTLS registry which can be accessed in perpetuity
• Enable participating providers and institutions to best assess the quality of care they provide by benchmarking their performance against peer facilities in real time
• Develop quality indicator best practice thresholds by jurisdiction, region and population
• Facilitate research that informs the development of future CTLS clinical guidelines and solutions

The registry will offer unparalleled simplicity of use by:

• Limiting mandatory fields, with additional voluntary fields available for participating institutions and jurisdictions interested in more detailed program analytics
• Offering registry membership at low or no cost to participating institutions and jurisdictions
• Accommodating all CTLS structured reporting systems
• Providing immediate access to each participant’s own data
• Enabling multi-institutional/multi-jurisdictional/regional quality improvement and research collaborations
• Offering out-of-the-box and customized quality reports
• Creating the capability to accept automatic data uploads from participating institutions

If you have any questions about the RLS registry or are interested in participating, please reach out to shawn.regis@rescuelung.org. Let’s continue to improve CTLS quality together.