| Sumario: | Data on breast cancer, lung cancer, and cervical cancer from the Chronic Disease Surveillance System were reviewed to examine the effectiveness of using hospital discharge data in assessing trends and geographic variation in the occurrence of disease. Between 1987 and 1991, the Chronic Disease Surveillance System used hospital discharge data, mortality data, and cancer registry data to track particular chronic diseases. For all 3 cancers, the rates obtained from hospital discharge data were higher than Cancer Registry rates. These discrepancies are possibly related to the inclusion of prevalent as well as incident cases in annual rates from hospital discharge data, the lack of identification of the link between all repeat hospital admissions of any given person within the same year, incomplete reporting of cases to the Cancer Registry, variations in admitting practices for a given disease over time and by area, or errors or biases in coding of hospital records.
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