Study data. VCR data. We obtained records from VCR
for all diagnosed cancer patients during years 2009–2011
living in the state of Virginia at the time of diagnosis. Ethical
approval for the study was granted by the IRB of Virginia
Commonwealth University. The VCR data included
demographic variables gender, race, age, health insurance
type, reporting hospital, and residential ZIP code at the
time of diagnosis or treatment. Originally, the data contained
160,307 records and 124,609 patients for the three
years of study. We detected and deleted duplicated records
for the same patient with the same cancer, tumor site, and
diagnosed date, which was because of reporting of the same
cancer for the same patient by different hospitals. After
excluding duplicated records and records with missing values,
we included 124,819 records and 118,452 patients in the
CA analysis. Of those patients, 6,286 (5.3%) patients were
diagnosed at MCC according to the reporting hospital coded
in the VCR data.