Quality Data
"Quality Measures" are specific data measurements that describe national and/or local benchmarks and goals set for specific hospital procedures. They are often a good indicator of the level and of the consistency of care offered at a medical center during a particular period of time. As a courtesy to our greater community and our website viewers, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center has dedicated a section of our website to the topic of "quality" so that our data scores (whether excellent or needing improvement) are visible and available to the public.

At this time, national quality measures for cancer are being developed and identified. These measures will be used nationally to evaluate the quality of cancer services at each medical center. Once these measures are clearly identified, we will be adding our cancer services quality data as it becomes available.

Higher Education & Expertise
Another way to measure an oncology program is to identify the number of clinicians on staff who have achieved a high level of education. At Alta Bates Summit, our cancer care teams consist of dedicated individuals who take their profession very seriously and who strive to stay informed of the latest procedures, cancer research, and emerging technologies.

Many are trained or certified to the highest levels of education in their field. This includes the large number of Oncology Certified Registered Nurses who work at our medical center, as well as our board-certified oncologists and hematologists, and our specially-trained radiologists who are experts in breast imaging.

With so many highly-trained team members, our cancer care services reflect a high quality of expertise. Below is a brief list of accrediting agencies and organizations that govern the certification process for higher education in the field of cancer care.

* American College of Surgeons (ACoS)
* Oncology Nursing Society (ONS)

Awards & Recognitions
The Oncology Services at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center have been recognized for their clinical excellence and ongoing commitment to the communities they serve. Below is a list of awards and recognitions our cancer programs have received in recent years.

2004 - Golden Triangle Award
The American Academy of Dermatology awarded our Markstein Cancer Education & Prevention Services this honor.

2004 – Accreditation
The American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer accredited our Oncology Services.

2003 – Three-Year Accreditation
The Foundation for the Accreditation of Hematopoietic Cell Therapy awarded accreditation to our
Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program - one of only two programs in Northern California with this distinction.

The Foundation for the Accreditation of Hematopoietic Cell Therapy (FACT) was established in 1996 to develop and implement the inspection and accreditation program of the parent organizations, the International Society for Hematotherapy and Graft Engineering (ISHAGE) and the American Society of Blood and Marrow Transplant (ASBMT). The process of attaining FACT Accreditation includes the assessment of written application materials against uniform accreditation criteria and an on-site inspection of each of the sites in the applicant hematopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) transplantation program.

Our Cancer Registry
A Cancer Registry is a confidential, computerized database of patient information which describes the details of the care and treatment each cancer patients receives and the outcomes of their treatment. All personal information is removed from the data so that it can be studied and shared.

At Alta Bates Summit, our Cancer Registry data is used by our clinicians to monitor trends in the incidence, staging, treatment, outcome, and survival of cancer patients admitted to the medical center. The data is also used extensively by our medical staff to evaluate and improve the quality of care delivered to our patients, and may also be used by hospital leadership for program planning and resource allocation.

The presence of a Cancer Registry is an important quality indicator for any medical center. In a Commission on Cancer (COC) approved Cancer Registry, such as ours, our physicians, patients, insurance providers, and other community medical facilities served by Alta Bates Summit Medical Center benefit by the data it provides and stores. Our Cancer Registry is also a required component of certification by the COC and the American College of Surgeons (ACOS). This certification is considered a mark of excellence for hospital-based cancer programs, such as ours.

Because cancer is a reportable disease in the state of California, the information is also electronically uploaded to the California Cancer Registry, the largest population-based cancer registry in the world. The data is then used by epidemiologists, statisticians, and scientists from around the world for original research on the incidence and treatment of cancer.