The American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) has historically delivered its Cancer Staging Manual as a bound reference text. However, with over 80 chapters and 1000 pages of information, accessing specific, relevant content within the Staging Manual involved physically searching through the book. Today, with the advent of widely used health information systems, the AJCC needed to restructure the information in the manual for digital delivery.
The Problem: Digitizing Print Reference Material Required Manual Conversion Into Interoperable Content
The AJCC Cancer Staging Manual, now in its eighth edition, has traditionally been delivered as a book. The information in the Manual is complex and accessing it in a physical text was time-consuming. In addition, clinicians needed the ability to annotate their patient with information found in the Staging Manual. Integrating this complex information into health information systems was the answer, however, until now the developers of these systems had to manually convert the information into digital formats, organize it, and import it into their systems. This manual process was time-consuming and potentially error-prone.
