“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” - Peter Drucker
Bridge of Health’s mission is to give every child battling cancer a fighting chance. Though funding for medical treatments makes a huge difference for pediatric cancer patients, we can do more. As such, Bridge of Health is taking the first steps in Armenia's history to establish a practical cancer registry.
Cancer.gov describes a cancer registry as “an information system designed for the collection, storage, and management of data on persons with cancer. Registries play a critical role in cancer surveillance, which tells us where we are in the efforts to reduce the cancer burden.” Measuring previous pediatric cases will allow medical professionals a better understanding of oncology within Armenia.
As of September of 2018, Bridge of Health has initiated the funding of a hospital-based registry using St. Jude’s platform as a template to collect clinical and demographic data. This data will provide valuable research tools for tracking treatments and outcomes and allow for geographical comparisons as well as monitoring the cancer burden over time. Without a registry, little progress can be made in evidence-based interventions. It is our goal to attack childhood cancer in Armenian in more ways than one.
Currently, Armenian has a “population-based” registry where only patient demographics are listed, not disease etiology. Bridge of Health’s hospital-based registry will gather the necessary data that can be used to improve diagnoses, treatment plans, recovery time, and preventive strategies. Different hospitals as well as research studies will have access to the registry, spreading the knowledge gained from the detailed tracking of each oncology case.
Bridge of Health will allocate $20,000 in funds to be dispersed quarterly toward the cancer registry and expects the project to be completed in March of 2020.