The Cancer Information Service Telephone Evaluation and Reporting System (CISTERS): a new tool for assessing quality assurance.

With more than 500,000 annual telephone inquiries from the public, health professionals, and others, the toll-free telephone-based Cancer Information Service (CIS) has rapidly evolved into a primary contact point and resource for people seeking cancer-related information. As the CIS continues to grow, quality-assurance issues are increasingly important both to maintain a high quality of responses to callers and to ensure the accuracy of information transmitted. The Cancer Information Service Telephone Evaluation and Reporting System (CISTERS), a computer-based interactive interviewing system, is being developed to provide quantitative measures of various aspects of the quality of CIS responses to telephone inquiries. In addition to supplying quantitative feedback to both the National Cancer Institute (NCI) CIS office and the regional CIS offices, CISTERS also allows program managers to identify and provide for staff training needs. CISTERS is a substantial part of NCI's commitment to quality control and assessment of needs within the CIS network and may have significant implications for the growing number of other national telephone-based, health-information helplines.