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/