Organization

Field Name

ID

Required

KCR

Date of First Contact (DateFirstContact)

30150

yes

NAACCR

Date of 1st Contact

580

yes


Field Length:  8

The date of first contact is the date of the facility’s first inpatient or outpatient contact with the patient for diagnosis or treatment of the cancer. In most instances, it is the patient’s physical presence at the facility that denotes "contact." When a pathology specimen is collected off-site and submitted to the facility to be read (and the specimen is positive for cancer), but the patient is never seen at the facility, the case is not required to be abstracted (although a copy of the pathology report must be sent to KCR to be abstracted).  

Instructions for Coding

  • Record the date the patient first had contact with the facility as either an inpatient or outpatient for the diagnosis and/or treatment of a reportable tumor.  The date may be the date of an outpatient visit for a biopsy, X-ray, or laboratory test, or the date a pathology specimen was collected at the hospital.

  • If this is an autopsy or death certificate only case, then use the date of death.

  • When a patient is diagnosed in a staff physician's office, the date of first contact is the date the patient was physically first seen at the reporting facility.

Examples

A patient has an outpatient mammography that is suspicious for malignancy on February 12, 2008, and subsequently undergoes an excisional biopsy or radical surgical procedure on February 14, 2008

02/12/2008

Patient undergoes a biopsy in a physician's office on September 8, 2009.  The pathology specimen is sent to the reporting facility and read as malignant melanoma.  The patient enters the reporting facility on September 14, 2009 for wide re-excision.

09/14/2009

Patient has an MRI of the brain on December 7, 2010, for symptoms including severe headache and disorientation.  The MRI findings are suspicious for astrocytoma.  Surgery on December 19 removes all gross tumor.

12/07/2010