The phrase “cancer registry backlog” is enough to keep any Oncology Data Management manager, or Oncology Data Specialist, up at night. It’s more than just a list of pending abstracts; it’s a psychological weight that hangs over an entire department. When a registry is six months or a year behind, the stress permeates every meeting. You aren’t just managing data; you are managing a mounting crisis that threatens your Commission on Cancer (CoC) accreditation, delays critical facility funding, and leads to inevitable staff burnout.

The Bottleneck: The “Search-and-Find” Trap

For decades, the primary bottleneck in clearing a backlog hasn’t been the ODS’s ability to code—it’s been their inability to find the data quickly. In legacy systems, casefinding is a manual, labor-intensive scavenger hunt. Specialists spend hours sifting through pathology reports, radiology feeds, and clinician notes just to identify a reportable case. By the time they actually begin the abstraction, they’ve already exhausted a significant portion of their mental bandwidth.

This manual “Search-and-Find” model is the reason backlogs feel unbeatable. As long as your team is spending 40% of their day just identifying cases, they will never outpace the rate of new diagnoses.

The KACI Solution: The Move to “Review-and-Validate”

NeuralFrame’s KACI platform flips this script. Instead of forcing your team to hunt for cases, KACI’s HL7 Pathology Casefinding brings the cases to them. By automatically ingesting and analyzing pathology reports from your facility in real-time, KACI uses advanced algorithms to evaluate diagnostic terms and negation phrases.

Within minutes of a report posting to the EHR, KACI flags candidate cases. This shifts the ODS role from a scavenger hunt to a high-level “Review-and-Validate” workflow.

• Real-Time Alerts: Automated notifications tell your team exactly where to focus their attention.

• Negation Flagging: KACI doesn’t just look for keywords; it understands context, flagging negation phrases so your team doesn’t waste time on non-reportable findings.

• Instant Text Transfer: Pathological text can be moved directly into the abstract with a single click, eliminating tedious re-typing.

Reclaiming Your Registry

Clearing a backlog isn’t about working more hours; it’s about working with a more intelligent modern ODS abstracting solution. When you remove the manual casefinding hurdle, your team can finally focus on the clinical data science they were trained for. With KACI, a “permanent” 6-month backlog can be dismantled in weeks, restoring your facility’s compliance and, more importantly, your team’s peace of mind.