The Population Cancer Assessment and Surveillance Engine (PopCASE): An Emerging Population Cancer Data Platform

Spatially linking cancer registry records to information describing the communities where patients live can enhance the utility of registry data. Here, we describe the ongoing development of an application, the Population Cancer Assessment and Surveillance Engine (PopCASE), that will allow central cancer registries or their designees to set up a population cancer data platform linking a registry's data with community data. PopCASE links registry records by patient residential address to demographic, socioeconomic, household, transportation, healthcare access, screening, risk factor, and other community metrics. Users can query the data by demographic, geographic, or disease criteria via a user interface and receive results, including case counts, age-adjusted incidence and mortality, stage at diagnosis, time-to-treatment, and dozens of community measures stratified by county, census place ("municipality"), zip code tabulation area (ZCTA), and census tract. PopCASE may also be used to create patient-level linked research data sets. We anticipate two likely implementation scenarios: 1) a cancer center where a research team with appropriate institutional review board (IRB) approval uses an instance of PopCASE for their catchment-level population cancer research in a secure data environment, and 2) a central cancer registry that hosts their own secure instance of PopCASE.