When you add a patient in CCR, you are not necessarily adding that patient to the CCR database, you are registering that patient into your cancer group. The process of adding the patient searches the university's EDW database for that patient's diagnosis records and links the new patient record in your cancer group registry to the information in the EDW. Patients may be registered in more than one cancer group, and some CCR information about the patient will be shared by all cancer groups that have registered that patient while some will be stored and accessible only to users from the cancer group that entered that information in the database.

Likewise, deleting a patient from your cancer group registry does not actually remove the patient from the CCR database. While information specific to your cancer group will be deleted, data that is shared among cancer groups and information collected by other cancer groups with which the patient record is associated will remain unaffected by the "deletion."

CCR is designed to allow individual cancer groups and studies to add, customize and collect extensible data about a patient, in addition to the standard fields of data described in this documentation. This customization is handled by cancer group administrators who set up the various tabs, fields, grids and other data structures where such information will be stored about the patient using the Metabuilder tool — see The Metabuilder — and allows each cancer group to track information that is of specific interest in their area of research. This customized data is specific to each cancer group and/or study and will not be available to users from other cancer groups. For information regarding specific customized fields, or if you need to have customized fields added for storing and maintaining additional information to assist your research, speak with your cancer group administrator and they will, in turn, work with Research Informatics programmers to make any necessary changes.