Quantifying limitations in chemotherapy data in administrative health databases: Implications for measuring the quality of colorectal cancer care

Reliable chemotherapy data are critical to evaluate the quality of care for patients with colorectal cancer who are treated with curative intent. In Canada, limitations in the availability and completeness of chemotherapy data exist in many administrative health databases. In this paper, we discuss these limitations and present findings from a chart review in Nova Scotia that quantifies the completeness of chemotherapy capture in existing databases. The results demonstrate that even basic information on cancer treatment in administrative databases can be insufficient to perform the types of analyses that most decision-makers require for quality-of-care measurement.