SEER*Educate: Use of Abstracting Quality Index Scores to Monitor Improvement of All Employees

Integral parts of the Seattle-Puget Sound's Cancer Surveillance System registry's continuous improvement model include the incorporation of SEER*Educate into its training program for all staff and analyzing assessment results using the Abstracting Quality Index (AQI). The AQI offers a comprehensive measure of overall performance in SEER*Educate, which is a Web-based application used to personalize learning and diagnostically pinpoint each staff member's place on the AQI continuum. The assessment results are tallied from 6 abstracting standards within 2 domains: incidence reporting and coding accuracy. More than 100 data items are aligned to 1 or more of the 6 standards to build an aggregated score that is placed on a continuum for continuous improvement. The AQI score accurately identifies those individuals who have a good understanding of how to apply the 6 abstracting standards to reliably generate high quality abstracts.