Commission on Cancer
The Commission on Cancer (CoC) is a consortium of professional organizations dedicated to improving survival and quality of life for cancer patients through standard setting, which promotes cancer prevention, research, education, and monitoring of comprehensive quality care.
The multidisciplinary CoC
- Establishes standards to ensure quality, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive cancer care delivery in health care settings
- Conducts surveys in health care settings to assess compliance with those standards
- Collects standardized data from CoC-accredited health care settings to measure cancer care quality
- Uses data to monitor treatment patterns and outcomes and enhance cancer control and clinical surveillance activities
- Develops effective educational interventions to improve cancer prevention, early detection, cancer care delivery, and outcomes in health care settings.
Individuals and representatives of more than 50 cancer-related organizations comprise the membership of the CoC and contribute to the development of the CoC standards and accreditation program.
Today, there are more than 1,500 CoC-accredited cancer programs in the United States and Puerto Rico. CoC accreditation encourages hospitals, treatment centers, and other facilities to improve their quality of care through various cancer-related programs and activities. These programs are concerned with the full continuum of cancer—from prevention to survivorship and end-of-life-care—while addressing both survival and quality of life.
CoC Standards and Resources
Commission on Cancer (CoC) accreditation provides real value to accredited programs. Programs can proudly demonstrate to their community—and to providers, payers, and the government—that they have invested in systems to ensure that cancer patients receive high-quality, coordinated care. Cancer programs can show they have made the efforts necessary to ensure that supportive services and resources addressing the full continuum of care are available in their community.
CoC accreditation includes data reporting to and feedback from the CoC National Cancer Database (NCDB) to assess hospital performance using nationally recognized quality of cancer care measures. These data systems allow hospitals to compare their quality of care, identify variations, and implement improvements to demonstrate the high quality of care that they provide and their commitment to continuous quality improvement. CoC accreditation also provides your cancer program with an infrastructure and data that informs care. It gives your team opportunities for leadership development, team building, and programmatic development.
Achieving accreditation by the CoC ensures your patients receive:
- Comprehensive, patient-centered care through a multidisciplinary team-approach
- Access to information on clinical and new treatment options
- Ongoing monitoring of care and lifelong patient follow-up
- Psycho-social support and survivorship care
- Continuous quality improvements in care
2020 COC Standards and Resources
Commission on Cancer 2020 Operative Standards