Scott Community College offers both an Associate in Applied Science (AAS) Degree program and a Diploma program in Cancer Information Management. These programs are designed to meet the state of Iowa AAS and Diploma requirements and the National Cancer Registrar's Association (NCRA) formal education requirements. All courses will be offered in the online format only.

NOTE: The Certificate program is designed for HIT students or other allied health students who have already completed all medical science courses. Current health professionals such as RHIT's, RHIA's, or RN's who have already completed the prerequisites and co-requisites only need to complete the eight professional core courses.

Cancer Information Management prepares you for a career working in hospital-based cancer registries or population-based, central registries. Cancer registration is the basic method by which information about the incidence, type, extent of disease at time of diagnosis, treatment methods used and survival of patients with cancer is systematically collected. Cancer registrars play an important role in the fight against cancer. Cancer registry professionals are required to collect, analyze, and disseminate cancer data.

Specific duties include:

• Identifying reportable cancers.
• Abstracting patient cancer data from patient records, pathology, radiology and other reports.
• Coding and staging primary site, histology and extent of disease.
• Monitoring timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of cancer data.
• Performing cancer patient follow-up activities to identify second primaries, recurrences and spread of disease.
• Reporting cancer data to health care officials, hospital administrators, physician regulatory agencies for use in cancer prevention and control.
• Assisting medical staff and epidemiologists in special studies and research.
• Supervising staff.
• Assuring patient privacy and data integrity and security.
• Major areas of study in this program are medical terminology, anatomy/physiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology, computer principles anddata presentation methods, statistics and epidemiology, registry organization & operations, data abstracting principles, oncology coding and staging fundamentals, legal and ethical issues, and quality management principles.