The Michigan Cancer Consortium Initiative is regarded as a challenging, innovative approach to comprehensive cancer control and is recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a model for the nation.

The MCC Initiative is organized around strategies that target cancer prevention, early detection, treatment, rehabilitation, and end-of-life care. At the core of each of these strategies is the concept of collaboration, a concept that can be seen in the day-to-day reality of public and private partners throughout Michigan working together to achieve the 10 cancer control priorities of the MCC Initiative.

The MCC Initiative is a project of the Michigan Cancer Consortium (MCC), a network of organizations that provides statewide leadership and a forum to achieve cancer control priorities in Michigan. The MCC's decisions reflect the Consortium's Guiding Principles, which stress that the MCC's collective focus should be on cancers with a significant disease burden and that priorities should be established based upon:

• opportunities and the potential to significantly reduce cancer incidence, mortality and morbidity;

• feasibility; and

• what can best be done collaboratively.

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MCC member and key partner organizations believe that all Michigan residents should have access to comprehensive cancer control services across the continuum of care. They strive to use resources efficiently and work to ensure that their decisions are data-driven whenever possible. In fact, cancer-based data are central to all MCC Initiative efforts, from planning to implementation to evaluation.

Working together to further the priorities of the MCC Initiative, organizations have:

• used disease burden data from the MDCH Cancer Registry and Vital Records offices to help identify 10-year trends in cancer incidence, mortality and staging, as well as geographic distribution of various cancers and differences among specific populations in the state;

• used cost burden data from Medicare, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and hospital discharges to identify and understand both the financial costs (insurance claims, hospital admissions, and length of hospital stays) and the human costs (years of life lost) of various cancers;

• gathered data from various sources regarding the prevalence of behaviors that can affect an individual's risk for cancer, and used those data to tailor and evaluate potential population-based intervention efforts; and

• sought out research data to identify specific barriers that can affect an individual's ability to obtain cancer screening and treatment services, studied those data in conjunction with data regarding interventions that have proven to be effective in surmounting those barriers, and used the combined knowledge from those efforts to form and implement comprehensive cancer control strategies.

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last updated: 03/17/05

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