General information

The Portal of Cancer Epidemiology in the Czech Republic provides access to data and analyses on cancer epidemiology in the Czech Republic. The content of the portal has been developed in close cooperation between the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (IHIS CR) and the Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University (FM MU) under the professional guarantee of the Czech Society for Oncology and other professional societies of the Czech Medical Association. The main source of data on cancer epidemiology in the Czech Republic is the Czech National Cancer Registry; other necessary data inputs are obtained from the Czech Statistical Office.

Data collected in the Czech National Cancer Registry demonstrate the growing cancer burden in the Czech population. Despite the high incidence of cancer, it has been possible to stabilise or even reduce its mortality rate in the long term, which subsequently leads to a significant increase in the overall prevalence of patients living with cancer or a history of cancer. There is no doubt that caring for high numbers of patients will continue to generate a significant burden on the healthcare system in the near future. Monitoring the epidemiology of cancer plays a key role not only in planning the required treatment capacity but also in the retrospective evaluation of treatment outcomes.

The Portal of Cancer Epidemiology in the Czech Republic is publicly available at www.svod.cz. One of the main objectives of the portal is to make epidemiological data on cancer in the Czech Republic available to the general public in a wide range of modalities. The portal includes sections with open data and data summaries, already prepared and published analyses, and a robust tool for interactive data analysis and visualisation (SVOD: System for Visualisation of Oncology Data). The SVOD system makes epidemiological data available in different views through predefined analytical tools in both graphical and tabular form. The main topics are cancer incidence, mortality, prevalence and patient survival.

The portal meets the basic objectives of the National Cancer Control Plan 2030 in the area of monitoring population risks related to cancer, as well as planning the necessary capacities for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Another objective of this portal is to provide relevant information on cancer epidemiology and survival of cancer patients in the Czech Republic to those interested from abroad.

The fact that data on cancer epidemiology in the Czech Republic are being made available fulfils the departmental Concept of data sharing and secondary data mining within the National Health Information System. The portal provides open datasets to enable users to perform independent and full-fledged analyses in cancer epidemiology. In this area, the project also envisages interactive cooperation with specialists in the field, including the publication of new datasets created on the basis of authors' suggestions as well as scenarios suggested by external users.