On Monday, October 4, 2010 the Commission on Cancer (CoC) will officially launch the new CAnswer Forum to replace the Inquiry and Response System. The Inquiry and Response System will remain accessible as a view only resource so that users can continue to research previously submitted questions and answers. The shift to this new platform will provide an opportunity for the user community to become more engaged in, and participate in a dialogue about how they interpret and use the data standards to abstract cancer cases, and how they interpret and use the cancer program standards to support accreditation. Thus the new system will allow for knowledge sharing among the user community working with data and cancer program standards on a daily basis.
The CAnswer Forum is a web-based and robust virtual bulletin board accessible to all cancer care professionals. The new format includes specific forums for discussion on all relevant topics such as American Joint Committee on Cancer TNM staging, CoC Cancer Program Standards, Collaborative Stage (CS), Facility Oncology Registry Data Standards (FORDS), National Cancer Data Base (NCDB) Quality Tools, Multiple Primary/Histology (MP/H), ICD-0, Hematopoietic disease, and related topics. The user community can post questions to various forums as well as answer questions that others may have posted, thus serving as a resource available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The exceptions to this community-based system include the Collaborative Stage Forum inquires which will be answered by the Collaborative Stage Technical Advisory Panel (CTAP) and the Multiple Primary/Histology (MP/H), ICD-0, and hematopoietic inquires which will be answered by a panel from SEER.
All participants will be required to complete a one-time registration within the new CAnswer Forum and create a user ID and password (if you are a CoC Data links user, you may want to use the same password). To register please go to the following link, h:ttp://cancerbulletin.facs.org/forums/ and become an active participant in this new virtual environment by sharing your knowledge and lending your expertise to support the cancer care community.
Once you register and navigate to the home page in the system you will notice a host of supportive and instructional information. Click on “help” and the system will bring you to the FAQ documents where you will find everything you need to know about how to use the system, e.g. General Forum Use, Settings and Profile features, and Reading and Posting questions. Don’t miss the resource section where you can access the former Inquiry and Response System. Additional resources will be posted here in the near future and the Forum Calendars where educational program dates are posted.
We invite you to access the new CAnswer Forum today!
If you have any questions regarding the CAnswer Forum, please email CAnswerforum@facs.org
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