Original Contribution Closing the Quality Loop: Facilitating Improvement in Oncology Practice Through Timely Access to Clinical Performance Indicators

Purpose: Health care organizations and professionals are be-ing called on to develop clear and transparent measures of qual-ity and to demonstrate the application of the data to performance improvement at the system and provider levels. Materials and Methods: Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) initi-ated a pathology reporting project aimed at improving the quality of cancer pathology by standardizing the content, format, and transmission of reports to a central registry and enabling the information to be available for planning, quality measurement, and quality improvement. This population-based quality-im-provement project involved more than 400 Ontario pathologists and more than 100 hospitals. Clinically relevant quality indicators that used the newly available data were developed and shared. Synoptic pathology data were electronically captured at the poin