The Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS)
The Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS) is a major health intelligence initiative co-produced by Public Health Scotland (PHS) and the Innovative Healthcare Delivery Programme (IHDP) to provide healthcare professionals with more flexible and faster access to a broad range of high-quality cancer-related information and intelligence, to support better cancer services and outcomes.
SCRIS forms the backbone of a new approach to cancer intelligence for Scotland – the Scottish Cancer Intelligence Framework.
SCRIS will enable clinicians to have direct access to timely analysed data, supporting better outcomes for patients, as well as allowing benchmarking with other UK nations.
SCRIS dashboards are a collection of cancer-related dashboards providing a single point of entry to national cancer analysis from a broad range of data sources, presented in interactive reports at Scotland, NHS Board and Regional Cancer Network geographies.
SCRIS will enable clinicians to have direct access to timely analysed data, supporting better outcomes for patients, as well as allowing benchmarking with other UK nations.
SCRIS offers the ability to drill down to more granular analysis for those with appropriate level of access approval (for example individual patient level data is only accessible to healthcare professionals involved in those patients’ care). SCRIS dashboards are organised into five categories to reflect key areas of interest for NHS Scotland’s users, aligned with national clinical and public health priorities:
- Prevention
- Early Detection
- Treatment
- Management
- Continuous professional development
Initially launched for NHS users in May 2019, SCRIS will continue to be developed in response to different user needs. PHS continues to develop a range of user materials to optimise use and aid navigation of the SCRIS dashboards.
Ultimately, users of SCRIS dashboards will include NHS staff (clinicians, service managers, cancer networks), researchers (academia and other sectors), and patients.
Cancer Intelligence Platform
The Cancer Intelligence Platform (CIP) is the engine that drives SCRIS, and is being developed to provide a single source of national cancer data for analysis, regardless of where the data are held, by creating views of the source data.
The source can be a dataset which is part of the National Services Scotland (NSS) Corporate Data Warehouse, a standalone database, or files submitted to the platform (and held in a variety of locations within the Health Service). Data analysts will be able to access the data using a range of analysis tools. Summary analysis of this data will be made available to healthcare professionals through the SCRIS dashboards.
During development, only PHS analysts will have access to the data in CIP. In future, PHS intend to provide access to analysts in NHS boards via a secure user access system.
NSS provides a secure platform for gaining access to data systems and dashboards which involves security clearance, usually provided by the requestor’s organisational Information Governance lead
The development of the National Cancer Intelligence Platform will continue to drive the ‘Once for Scotland’ approach to the wealth of cancer data we have in this country”
Gregor McNie
Lead of the Cancer Policy Team, Scottish Government
Cancer Intelligence platform data flow
Context
Scottish Cancer Registry
Cancer Registration is the collection, maintenance and management of data on every new diagnosis of cancer occurring in a population. In Scotland, approximately 55,000 cancer registrations are made annually. The Scottish Cancer Registry database holds over 1,800,000 records dating back to 1958, when the registry began.
Cancer registries are unique in being able to provide historical trend and population-based data to monitor changes in cancer incidence and survival over long periods of time. Cancer registries across the world share the same main objective: to deliver timely, comparable and high-quality cancer data.
A patient registry is an organised system that collects data and information on a group of patients defined by a particular disease, condition or exposure (e.g. to a treatment), and that serves a pre-determined scientific, clinical and/or public health (policy) purpose.
Public Health Scotland (PHS) – launched April 2020
National Services Scotland (NSS) provided data intelligence through the Information Services Division (ISD). In April 2020, ISD moved into a new body, Public Health Scotland (PHS). PHS is Scotland’s lead national agency for improving and protecting the health and wellbeing of all of Scotland’s people.
NSS Digital and Security continue to provide IT services to PHS as part of NSS’s shared service offering to the whole of NHSScotland.
Published cancer content
PHS cancer statistics pages provide a wide range of statistical analyses based on data from the Scottish Cancer Registry, the National Records of Scotland and other national data sets. Some of these are also published as data visualisations. In addition to National Statistics outputs, other less regular reports are produced periodically.
https://beta.isdscotland.org/find-publications-and-data/conditions-and-diseases/cancer/
Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS) impact story overview
The Scottish Cancer Registry and Intelligence Service (SCRIS) is a major health intelligence initiative co-produced by National Services Scotland (NSS) and the Innovative Healthcare Delivery Programme (IHDP).
Developing national SACT reporting impact story overview
Impact Stories
The ways in which IHDP’s approach and activities contributed to improved outcomes and impact are shown through impact stories.