Tumor Tips

Tumor Tip of the Week: 10-6-2023 NAACCR Recommended Abbreviations and Acronyms

Scenario:  Abstractor documented this in text “59 YOAIWF”

Question:  What does YOAIWF mean????

  • Year Old American Institute of Wine & Food
  • Year Old Allied Independent Wrestling Federations
  • It means the registrar needs to quit making up abbreviations & use the NAACCR Recommended Abbreviations and Acronyms table

Answer:  It means the registrar needs to quit making up abbreviations & use the NAACCR Recommended Abbreviations and Acronyms table 

Discussion:  The facility decided to make up their own abbreviations to save time.  However, no one outside the facility knows this abbreviation key.  I spent way too much time trying to figure it out, I finally just had to call and ask what in the world did that mean??? So, it did not save any time.  These non-standardized text formats make it impossible to extract that data in any meaningful way.  Please utilize the Recommended Abbreviations for Abstractors to make your data useful to everyone.

P.S.  When I asked that that abbreviation meant, they told me it meant 59-year-old Asian Indian Widowed Female.  I never would have figured that out, would you???

https://apps.naaccr.org/data-dictionary/data-dictionary/version=23/chapter-view/

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