Congratulations to the newly elected NAACCR Board Members. NAACCR appreciates all who ran for NAACCR Office.
Treasurer
Kevin Ward
Organization: Georgia Cancer Registry
Number of years working in central/regional cancer registry: 25
Current position and a brief description of duties:
Thoughts regarding the direction NAACCR should be moving towards and the goals the organization should be striving to attain:
NAACCR remains one of the most important organizations for the cancer surveillance community in the United States as it supports the entire surveillance infrastructure. Member participation is critical to achieve the organization’s objectives and engagement of volunteers must remain a top priority.
NAACCR is financially stable due to strong fiscal oversight and leadership but the organization must continue to explore options for engaging partners, both with intellectual capital and with finances, to support a surveillance infrastructure that continues to rapidly change with ongoing advancements in informatics and technology.
Past NAACCR position(s):
- Board – Treasurer, Current
- Board – Representative at Large
- MLTG Rep
- Data Evaluation and Cert Committee
- Case Completeness Task Force
- Research/Data Use Steering Committee
- Professional Development Steering Committee
- Program Committee
- Strategic Planning Oversight Committee
- Survival Analysis Workgroup
Representative-at-Large
Joshua Mazuryk
Organization: Ontario Health
Number of years working in central/regional cancer registry: 13.5
Current position and a brief description of duties:
Thoughts regarding the direction NAACCR should be moving towards and the goals the organization should be striving to attain:
Information on cancer continues to increase in content and complexity, as healthcare research and technology continues to grow and expand our knowledge of the disease. In order to respond to current and future data gathering requirements in a timely manner, I believe centralized registries will need to be more adaptable and less rigid. This will require understanding and employing new technology to existing and new healthcare data sources. Many of NAACCR current strategic management goals point to this fact. In order to improve data gathering needs, NAACCR will need to create new and utilize existing partnerships to develop standards, best practices and implementation guides for future data areas like familial and molecular genetics.
Much of this data already exists somewhere in the healthcare system, but are generally buried in unstructured text or in regionalized structured data fields. Guidance and support in interoperability and future technology, such as AI and other IT solutions, will be required in order to properly extract necessary data. Concurrently with the work to improve data collection in the centralized cancer registries, NAACCR can begin development of an organizational digital solution to better automate and collate the data it received faster and more accurately.
Past NAACCR position(s):
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Co-Chair ePath Workgroup – Volume V – Pathology Laboratory Electronic Reporting
Bozena Morawski
Organization: Cancer Data Registry of Idaho
Number of years working in central/regional cancer registry: 3.5
Current position and a brief description of duties:
Epidemiologist and Idaho SEER Co-Principal Investigator
I support all aspects of surveillance data collection as part of Idaho’s NPCR- and SEER-funded central cancer registry leadership team. Idaho’s team structure provides experience in the full spectrum of cancer surveillance – from the details of data collection and quality to policy and procedural aspects that impact registries nationally. A primary focus of my work is to increase appropriate use of cancer registry data by national and local partners in support of cancer prevention and control efforts. I conduct or consult on epidemiological analyses using Idaho-specific and NAACCR Cancer in North America (CiNA) data. These analyses and resulting publications are often focused on providing recommendations for the NAACCR community, e.g. impact of SSA-SER linkage on follow-up completeness, impact of cause of death completeness on survival estimates.
I also participate in state and national advisory committees, including the Idaho Cancer Analysis Work Group and Cancer Control Leadership Team, NCI’s Transplant Cancer Match Study Working Group, and NAACCR committees and workgroups (described below). My NAACCR work in particular has focused on developing practical data security and patient confidentiality guidelines for registries and setting standards for data quality with respect to the CiNA data products.
Thoughts regarding the direction NAACCR should be moving towards and the goals the organization should be striving to attain:
The 2021–2024 NAACCR strategic report has outlined important areas of focus for the coming years. Of particular importance to me is the issue of workforce recruitment, retention, and development. Cancer surveillance increasingly relies on linkages and automation to increase the amount of available and analyzable data. The backbone of quality and completeness in cancer registry data remains, however, a highly trained and specialized workforce that communicates and collaborates. The recruitment and retention of this workforce may be one of the largest challenges faced by the cancer surveillance community, and NAACCR should continue to focus efforts in this area. Second, NAACCR should continue to advocate for the thoughtful implementation of standards and data fields. I believe that a future WOW goal should potentially focus on this point – increasing clarity around abstracting rules with no tradeoff in data quality. Third, NAACCR must continue to work with registries to streamline and improve automated processes and the use of technology, improving equity in reporting burden, data uniformity and quality. The development of tools is paramount, as is technical assistance in their implementation. Finally, as a progression to the automation that the registry community has already seen, the use of cancer registry data in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications will be a critical opportunity and area of learning for the registry community moving forward. NAACCR is positioned to help registries holistically understand implications of AI/ML for their data, and help the registry community develop a strategy to minimize risk and maximize benefit. This is another potential area of focus for the next WOW goal and other ongoing NAACCR work.
Past NAACCR position(s):
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Data Security & Confidentiality Workgroup: Chair
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CiNA Research Network Workgroup: Co-chair
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CiNA Editorial Workgroup: Member
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CiNA Survival and Prevalence Workgroup: Member
-
Research Application Review Workgroup: Member
Sarah Nash
Organization: University of Iowa
Number of years working in central/regional cancer registry: 8
Current position and a brief description of duties:
Roles: Co-Investigator; Director of Research, Analytics, and Dissemination.
Responsibilities: Directing and managing a staff that engage in research and data use activities for the Iowa Cancer Registry, including: cancer cluster investigations; the Cancer in Iowa Report and other dissemination materials; quality improvement activities; internal research activities; and, supporting external investigators to either use registry data or conduct patient contact studies. Member of the ICR Senior Leadership Team
Thoughts regarding the direction NAACCR should be moving towards and the goals the organization should be striving to attain:
It has been exciting to be a part of NAACCR’s Board over the last two years as we have focused on strategic long-term planning for the direction that cancer registration, and the organisation, will take. Overall, my personal focus in these discussions has been consideration of research and data use, and equity; these interests are also reflected in the NAACCR workgroups and task forces that I sit on. Efforts to ensure that we have (as a system) high-quality data are critical; but, we also need to ensure that we are supporting access to NAACCR data by qualified investigators and member registries. Ultimately, the data that we collect are most useful when being used, be that for research, by public health agencies, or to share the national burden of cancer. For this reason, we need to support initiatives that support NAACCR’s commitment to high-quality data, and data access. I also believe that a focus on equity is critical. For this reason, I worked with other members of the Board to develop some strategic initiatives that NAACCR will be focusing on in this space. This includes both ensuring that we have the right data to support health equity research; as well as ensuring that NAACCR is helping to develop a diverse registry workforce, and that our Board is representative of the diversity of the workforce and member registries that we serve. If elected to a second term of the Board, these areas would continue to be my focus.
Yet, this is not to minimise the work of the other NAACCR Steering Committees: it is imperative that we have strong leadership and continue to develop Standardization and Registry Development which stand at the foundation of everything that the surveillance system does; including anticipating how registry needs will change as we consider things like rapid reporting, and informatics/AI. Further, communications is vitally important to sharing the work that we do and communicating the value both of NAACCR, and its member organisations, to our partners and funders. Therefore projects which support NAACCR’s external communication should be supported. Strategic Planning and Alliances supports ensuring that we have the right relationship and partners at the table; and Professional Development is critical not only to ensuring that we have a diverse workforce that is prepared to take on the challenges of the modern registry system, but also to support the equity/DEI initiatives I mentioned above. In short, the last two years on the Board have shown me the value of all facets of our organisation, and the need to work together to achieve NAACCR’s mission.
Past NAACCR position(s):
- Co-Chair, Strategic Management Plan workgroup (Board)
- Co-Chair, CiNA Research Network workgroup (RDU)
- Board Liaison, Research and Data Use Steering Committee (Board)
- Co-Chair, AIAN Data Taskforce (RDU)
- Member, CiNA Editorial Workgroup (RDU)
Previous Positions:
- Board – Representative at Large
- Chair, Research and Data Use Steering Committee (Board)
- Member, Data Use and Confidentiality Workgroup (RDU/S&RD)
