The April CTR Coding Break reviews the STORE data item – Date of First Contact. A brief overview is provided with STORE page numbers along with a working example. The STORE manual instructs to record the date the patient first had contact with the facility as either an inpatient or outpatient for diagnosis and/or first-course treatment of a reportable tumor. For analytic cases, the date of first contact is the date the patient became analytic. An example is provided where a patient presents to the reporting hospital for imaging and a radiation consult for an established diagnosis of prostate cancer. The patient subsequently receives radiation treatment at the facility. The date of first contact for this class 22 case is reinforced as the date of first treatment or when the patient qualified as an analytic case.
