Announcing the 2025 FCDS Annual Monograph
Comorbidities are medical conditions that patients have beyond the primary problems for which they are receiving treatment.
The presence of these conditions, such as liver disease, AIDS/HIV, or hypothyroidism, may complicate treatment for a given patient and result in worse outcomes. These conditions can have profound effects on the survival rates of many types of cancer, and some specific conditions can often co-occur with specific cancers.
To allow researchers to examine trends related to comorbid conditions among Florida cancer patients, the FCDS, through its partnerships with the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) and the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), will be making its data regarding comorbid conditions of Florida cancer cases available to users. This will be made available as the NAACCR item #2220 “FCDS DRG, Principal and Secondary Diagnoses” within the Data Request Automated Management System (DREAMS). Once the data item has been incorporated into DREAMS, this dataset will be available for approved users and has the possibility to be used for many research purposes.
This new dataset will contain a patient ID and a list of comorbid conditions the patient was diagnosed with, presented as International Classification of Diseases (ICD) condition codes. Several researchers have created indices that group ICD diagnosis codes related to the same condition together, creating lists of common comorbid conditions. These indices are quite useful in conducting comorbidity research, but they can be challenging to navigate for new users.
The FCDS 2025 Annual Monograph is a methodological analysis that will serve as a guide for users of this new comorbid condition dataset. It contains a step-by-step guide through all of the data processing necessary to turn the raw data they will receive into easily readable individual comorbid condition profiles for each patient using one of several comorbidity indices, a breakdown of the different indices they can choose from and the options they can select when creating their individual patient profiles, and examples of the types of analyses one can perform using this dataset in R.
All of us at the FCDS look forward to seeing the exciting and innovative projects that will use this dataset. We hope this monograph will be helpful for our users as they conduct these projects.
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