Quality of cervical cancer data system in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Southeastern Brazil.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate quality of a cervical cancer data system. METHODS Descriptive study on the completeness, validity, and sensitivity of data of the Cervical Cancer Data System (SISCOLO) in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Southeastern Brazil, based on the follow-up of a cohort of women, carried out between 2002 and 2006. The cohort consisted of 2,024 women living in communities served by the Family Health Program in the cities of Duque de Caxias and Nova Iguaçu. Two databases from the Siscolo, including cytopathology and confirmatory testing (colposcopy and histopathology) were compared to data from a reference database and medical records. The Bland-Altman plot was used to analyze continuous variables. The linkage between databases was analyzed using the RecLink software program. RESULTS The completeness of the data system was considered excellent with respect to the fields 'mother's name' and 'street address;' good for 'district of residence' and poor for 'zip code' and 'individual taxpayer number'. In regard to validity, sensitivity of the field 'date of collection' was 100% and 70.3% for confirmatory and cytopathology tests, respectively, while sensitivity of the field 'test results' was 100% for both tests. The sensitivity of the system to identifying cytopathology tests was 77.4% (95% CI: 75.0;80.0) whereas for confirmatory tests was 4.0% (95% CI: 0.0;21.3). CONCLUSIONS Data quality of SISCOLO was considered good, particularly for the fields related to cytopathology testing. The use of colposcopy and histopathology data was inadequate due to small number of cases registered in the System.