The first publication about SCARD was in the International Journal of Dermatology in a paper called “Measuring Performance in skin cancer practice: the SCARD Initiative.”
Published in January 2011, this paper was the first to study the data collected from the SCARD Data Pool, which, at the time, contained 177 practitioners with 77,553 specimens from 41,006 individual patients.
From the paper: Designed initially as a self-audit tool for primary care skin cancer practitioners, SCARD (the Skin Cancer Audit and Research Database) acts as a tracking tool to enhance practice safety, and it also creates practice performance reports. Pooling of de-identified data enables participating practitioners to confidentially compare their own practice to that of their peers. Additionally, this creates a large database with significant research potential, as SCARD records for every lesion de-identified practitioner and patient data, and extensive details of location, provisional and histological diagnosis, and the procedure(s) performed in its treatment.
The data presented are being analyzed for further studies, and additional data continues to be collected from this ongoing project. SCARD is a useful tool at practice level, and substantial uptake by Australian primary care skin cancer practitioners has provided a unique opportunity for research into skin cancer and its management.
The SCARD Data Pool is one of the resources that SCARD Inc will adopt and improve to provide practitioners with real-time statistics on skin malignancies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21182501/
Rosendahl C, Hansen C, Cameron A, Bourne P, Wilson T, Cook B, Baker M, Keir J, Dicker T, Reid M, Williamson R, Weedon D, Soyer HP, Youl PH, Wilkinson D. Measuring performance in skin cancer practice: the SCARD initiative. Int J Dermatol. 2011 Jan;50(1):44-51. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-4632.2010.04608.x. PMID: 21182501.
