Quality improvement of diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal cancer: establishment and implementation of the China Gastrointestinal Cancer Surgery Union Database

Abstract

Since the China Gastrointestinal Cancer Surgery Union was established, it has continuously collected the annual reports of 95 gastrointestinal surgery centers nationwide from 2014 to 2017, and collected data on more than 130 000 cases of gastric cancer. This article combines the experience of associated databases at home and abroad to analyze the construction of the China Gastrointestinal Cancer Surgery Union Database, and explore the role of multi-center cooperation and big data analysis in the promotion of gastrointestinal surgery. For a complete database to successfully achieve its ultimate goal, it needs clear goals, continuous funding, a qualified management team, consensus on data content, a high completion rate, and the support and cooperation of an advanced processing system. As a high-quality database with clear construction goals and database project construction based on the goals, while promoting the level of clinical diagnosis and treatment, it is also widely used in risk prediction model development, audit supervision, epidemiological research, health service research, and clinical hypothesis testing, etc. How to build a high-quality database to give a full promotion in clinical diagnosis and treatment is a huge challenge. Although the construction of medical databases in China has just started, we believe that with the further improvement in understanding, management and analysis capabilities for surgical databases, more databases including the China Gastrointestinal Cancer Surgery Union Database will make greater contributions in promoting the development of diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal cancer in China and the world.