RCIA: Automated Change Impact Analysis to Facilitate a Practical Cancer Registry System

摘要

The Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN) employs a cancer registry system to collect cancer patient data (e.g., diagnosis and treatments) from various medical entities (e.g., clinic hospitals). The collected data are then checked for validity (i.e., validation) and assembled as cancer cases (i.e., aggregation) based on more than 1000 cancer coding rules in the system. However, it is frequent in practice that the collected cancer data changes due to various reasons (e.g., different treatments) and the cancer coding rules can also change/evolve due to new medical knowledge. Thus, such a cancer registry system requires an efficient means to automatically analyze these changes and provide consequent impacts to medical experts for further actions. This paper proposes an automated Rule-based Change Impact Analysis (CIA) approach named RCIA that includes: 1) a change classification to capture the potential changes that can occur at CRN; 2) in total 80 change impact analysis rules including 50 dependency rules and 30 impact rules; and 3) an efficient algorithm to analyze changes and produce consequent impacts. We evaluate RCIA via a case study with 12 real change sets from CRN and a conducted interview. The results showed that RCIA managed to produce 100% actual change impacts and the medical expert at CRN is quite positive to apply RCIA to facilitate their cancer registry system. We also shared a set of lessons learned based on the collaboration with CRN.