Development of an algorithm to identify urgent referrals for suspected cancer from the Danish Primary Care Referral Database

In Denmark, the referrals of all patients suspected of having cancer are electronically stored. Using referred reference populations linked to primary care referrals the authors have created an algorithm, to identify urgent referrals for suspected cancer. The final algorithm had a sensitivity of 0.939 and a specificity of 0.937. The algorithm identified 94% of the patients urgently referred for suspected cancer. These results highlight that good quality data and data linkage have the potential to produce useful tools to help identify patients urgently referred for suspected cancer. Finally, the algorithm also provides a potential research tool to review cancer-related referral performance in general practice. Read the full article here.