A new era in cancer care in India

Four years after the National Cancer Grid (NCG) was formed to link cancer centres across the country, the Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) on Wednesday launched a virtual platform where these centres — up from 14 in 2012 to 85 now — will share their patient data, a site at tmc.gov.in/ncg. This step is important as it enables mapping of cancer patterns and, crucially, will throw up national data on the malady; this could, in turn, form the backbone of studies on cancer prevention.

Data sharing appeared to be the key highlight among the many plans that were rolled out to make standardised cancer care accessible to all. “We are in the era of evidence and data-driven strategies,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Director General, Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), after she launched the website via video conference. She said this kind of data sharing would potentially give larger numbers to analyse. She added that the ICMR too has a cancer registry and that the NCG and ICMR registries should come together and give harmonised data to the government.

Dr. C.S. Pramesh, coordinator of NCG and head of thoracic surgery at TMH, said the website wouldn’t just have basic data collection, it would also have focussed databases on cancer type and digital health records.

He said the data will be shared freely without revealing patient identities. He also said that preliminary talks were held with Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) to figure out if Aadhar cards could be linked to hospital records and death certificates.

A key change that the NCG website aims to bring about is a uniform standard of care at all cancer centres; this could, potentially, make it unnecessary for cancer patients to have to move to metros like Mumbai for treatment. A draft set of 22 guidelines to treat common cancers has been put up on the website, where they will remain open for comments for three months, after which they will be adopted as NCG guidelines.

Dr. Pramesh had, in an earlier paper, pointed out that although regional cancer centres exist across the country and geographically cover the population, they have varying standards of care, and that high-quality cancer care across the country will eliminate the need for patients to travel long distances.

Dr. Rajendra Badwe, director, Tata Memorial Centre, said that given the incidence of 200 cancer cases per 100,000 population in Northeast India, as against 100 cases per 100,000 seen in other parts of the country, TMH faculty will visit seven districts in the Northeast and hold workshops and training sessions as part of the ‘travelling school of pathology’ initiative of NCG.

Another area that NCG would focus on is palliative care. “Every NCG centre should have a palliative unit,” said Dr. Pramesh, adding that this would entail increasing palliative care training for specialists and oncologists.

Data sharing appeared to be the key highlight among the many plans that were rolled out