The Rapid Case Ascertainment Shared Resource at Yale Cancer Center has been a shared resource since 1995. Shared resources at Yale provide access to technologies, services, and scientific consultations that facilitate scientific interactions and enhance scientific productivity. The Rapid Case Ascertainment (RCA) Shared Resource functions as a field arm of the Connecticut Tumor Registry, as designated by the Commissioner of Public Health for Connecticut, and serves as a resource to population investigators at Yale Cancer Center, the State of Connecticut, and other institutions.
“We build on our unique relationship with the Connecticut Tumor Registry to facilitate population-based studies of cancer for Yale Cancer Center investigators, as well as outside investigators, who wish to use the state of Connecticut as a population laboratory,” said Rajni Mehta, MPH, and Director of RCA. RCA assumes responsibility for administrative tasks common to all proposed hospital-based research in the state and provides a uniformly high-quality, well-coordinated interface with those individuals, institutions, and agencies who are crucial to the success of cancer prevention and control research.
Some of the many tasks they perform include timely identification of newly diagnosed cancer cases in Connecticut, obtaining and maintaining Institutional Review Board approvals, which is a committee aimed at determining if research follows the ethical principles and federal regulations for the protection of human subjects, and collecting other data as needed. RCA consists of four members. The field staff are assigned geographically to hospitals in order to effectively cover all hospitals in the state and collect the necessary data. By assisting with these processes, RCA provides a service that would be difficult for individual Principal Investigators to achieve on their own in a limited study time period.
“RCA serves as a resource for investigators to accomplish their scientific goals. Personnel can accomplish tasks for many studies in a single hospital visit, phone call, or trip to the Connecticut Tumor Registry. The knowledge, relationships, and trust built by the RCA staff with the hospitals in Connecticut over the past many years provide a unique and essential service to investigators,” said Mehta.
Working as an agent of the Connecticut Tumor Registry, the RCA process is completely confidential and helps identify new cancer cases in Connecticut within weeks of diagnosis instead of years. This is critical to accomplishing scientific goals of population-based research. Since 1998, RCA has worked on 37 studies, 86% of which are/have been funded through a competitive peer-review process by agencies including the National Cancer Institute.
As a relatively new initiative, RCA is increasingly being used to support research initiatives in cancer survivorship, and will soon begin work on two newly funded studies on how physical activity can affect ovarian and breast cancer prognosis and survivorship. Thus, RCA is continuing to adapt itself to provide high-quality, well coordinated services to meet the needs of population scientists at and beyond Yale Cancer Center.