Developing and evaluating a simple, spreadsheet-based pathology report extraction system for cancer registrars

Surgical pathology reports are essential for cancer registry. However, cancer registrars in Taiwan still code manually from the pathology reports written in unstructured free-text. The purpose of this study was to develop a cost-effective tool to automatically code the free-text reports with Microsoft-û Excel VBA too. The time and accuracy performances between these two approaches were compared. Results showed that the cost-effectiveness and time-saving of the system and the potentials of using spreadsheet tools for healthcare professionals.