California Cancer Reporting System Standards Volume I: Abstracting and Coding Procedures for Hospitals
This field captures the month day and year of the patient’s diagnosis. It serves as the basis for computing incidence, survival, and other statistics. Accurate recording of the date of the first diagnosis of a reportable neoplasm is especially important.
See Section I.1.6.3 and I.1.6.4 for Coding and Entering Dates. Consult your software vendor for specific data entry instructions.
Enter the date a physician, surgeon, or dentist first stated that the patient has cancer, whether or not the diagnosis was ever confirmed microscopically. The rule applies even if the cancer was confirmed at a later date and whether or not the diagnosis was made at the reporting hospital or before admission.
When the first diagnosis includes reportable ambiguous terminology, record the date of that diagnosis, see Section II.2.4.
However, if upon clinical and/or pathological review of a previous condition it is determined that the patient had the tumor at an earlier date, enter that date (that is, backdate the diagnosis). For cases diagnosed at autopsy, enter the date of death. If diagnosis date is not known, see the Approximation section III.3.3.3.
Effective for all cases identified/first seen 1/1/2010 and forward, a completely unknown date of diagnosis is no longer allowed for all analytic cases (Class of Case 00-22).
At a minimum, the year of diagnosis is required for all analytic cases.
The year of diagnosis must be known or estimated and cannot be blank or unknown.
For instructions on determining a date of diagnosis , refer to Vague Dates, III.3.3.2, or Approximation III.3.3.3, and DSQC Memo #2011-04.
Text documentation must be provided for the basis of the estimated date.
Beginning in 2009, diagnosis and treatment dates for a fetus prior to birth are to be assigned the actual date of the event. In the past, those dates were set by rule to the date the baby was born.