Hospital-based cancer registries obtain death certificates from vital statistics government agencies in search for potentially missed cases.

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Understanding how cancer registries ensure complete case capture helps explain why this statement isn’t typical for hospital-based registries. Hospital-based registries focus on patients diagnosed or treated in a single hospital and mainly use hospital records, pathology reports, and discharge data to collect and update information. They do not routinely obtain death certificates from state vital statistics offices to search for missed cases. That method—linking death certificates to identify cases not captured in the registry—is a technique used by population-based registries to improve completeness across a broader population, not by hospital-based registries. So, this practice does not describe how hospital-based registries typically operate.