Leveraging the RUCA Tool to Address Geographic Disparities in Cancer Care: A Dual-Application Framework for Institutional and National Initiatives

This study describes the development and application of a dual-framework approach using Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes to identify and address geographic disparities at both institutional and national levels. The authors demonstrate how RUCA-based geographic classification can be applied to institutional cancer registry data to characterize the rurality of patient populations served, and how the same framework can be scaled to national datasets to identify disparities across the cancer care continuum.