Bruce Riddle, PhD, MA, an instructor in epidemiology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, has received the Constance L. Percy Award for Distinguished Service from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR), the umbrella organization of central registries in the U.S. and Canada.
The Constance L. Percy Award recognizes an individual who has contributed exceptional volunteer service to the NAACCR—a professional organization working to develop uniform data standards for cancer registration, while promoting the use of cancer surveillance data and systems for cancer control and epidemiological research, public health programs, and patient care.
“I’m going to retire soon, so to have the organization recognize my 20 years of effort is life-affirming,” says Riddle, who was surprised and delighted to receive the award at the NAACCR’s annual conference held last week in Vancouver, Canada.
“Geisel has provided an intellectually comfortable home—the things I’ve discovered working with the data here and the problems I’ve tried to solve, I’ve shared with the broader community,” he says.
Riddle is the registry manager for the New Hampshire State Cancer Registry (NHSCR)—a population-based cancer surveillance program, which collects incidence data on all cancer cases in the state. The Division of Public Health Services has contracted with Geisel’s Department of Epidemiology to operate the NHSCR since its inception in 1985.
In his role, Riddle oversees the technical side of registry procedures for reporting cases through hospital registries, pathology laboratories, hospital discharge data, and Meaningful Use (the use of certified electronic health records systems as determined by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services).
Many of Riddle’s contributions to the science of the registry community have been both innovative and impactful. They include: being a pioneer in recognizing and addressing data security issues; devising a single mechanism to obtain NH cancer reports from multiple Veterans Administration facilities, which highlighted the importance of sharing Veterans data nationally and created a model for other states to follow; and proposing a new infrastructure for cancer incidence reporting, called an event-driven data set, which was published in the Journal of Registry Management.
Prior to joining Dartmouth in 1999, Riddle was the director of the Maxwell School’s Computing and Technology Group at Syracuse University, where he provided services to 130 faculty, 90 support staff, and 6,600 students.
Riddle earned his PhD and MA degrees from Syracuse University in 1977 and 1985, respectively.
