Editorial: Tracking cancer patients

Saturday, Oct. 13, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

Medical researchers say that a change in how Veterans Affairs is willing to submit medical data on its patients for the nation's cancer tracking program likely will make it harder to chart trends, survival rates and clusters of the disease.

State laws require hospitals to submit the names, addresses, ages, races and medical histories of cancer patients to a national registry, which is used by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track cancer statistics. The VA is not required to submit data, but has always done so - at least it did until this summer.

After being dogged by security breaches the past two years - including the loss of a laptop computer that imperiled the personal data of 2.6 million U.S. veterans and active-duty military personnel - the VA changed its policy on providing patient information.

The agency will provide the information only on cancer patients in states that have agreed to a new process that some researchers call cumbersome.

Under the new restrictions, it could take up to a year to gain access to cancer patients' data, and some states are refusing to sign it, medical researchers said in a New York Times story on Wednesday.

The likely result is that next year's national cancer statistics could be missing thousands of cancer patients who are being treated by the VA. If the incidences of certain types of cancers drop, researchers won't know whether it is because of treatment and early diagnosis or because a large chunk of the nation's cancer patients weren't counted. Researchers also may miss clusters of cancer among populations that may, for example, live next to a toxic waste dump or other biohazard.

Certainly, the VA has reason to improve its protection of patients' privacy. But this new policy could end up doing more to hinder the treatment of cancer patients than protecting them. VA officials should rework this policy so that patients are protected and researchers have more reasonable access to this crucial data.