Colorectal and Cervical Cancer Screening – Interpretive notes

Updated as of January 22, 2016

• Virtual rostering assigns patients to the primary care physician that provided the highest dollar amount of services within a defined set of primary care services. Your team may not be aware of which patients have been virtually rostered to them so may erroneously think that these patients are not “your” patients. Hence, your team’s sense of how many of “your” patients were screened may be different than shown in D2D.
• Screening tests performed in hospital laboratories or paid through alternate payment plans are not currently incorporated into this measure. Actual performance on this measure for teams that use hospital laboratories is therefore likely higher than the level presented in D2D.
• Please note: for colorectal cancer screening, a small proportion of FOBTs performed as diagnostic tests could not be excluded from the analysis
• Inaccurate recording of exclusion criteria may result in an under-estimation of screening rates as patients who are not eligible for screening would be erroneously included in the denominator, artificially driving the observed rate down.
• The current measure does not consider patient choice in screening and therefore might reflect an under-estimate of the screening “interventions” (i.e. consultations/advice to undertake screening) by the team.