What best distinguishes a population-based cancer registry from a hospital-based registry?

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The main idea here is coverage and purpose. A population-based registry is designed to capture every new cancer case occurring in a defined population (such as a geographic area or demographic group) so public health surveillance can track incidence and survival over time. It gathers data from multiple sources—hospitals, pathology labs, imaging centers, and death certificates—to ensure completeness, which makes it possible to calculate true population-level incidence rates and survival estimates.

A hospital-based registry, by contrast, collects data from patients treated within one or a few hospitals and concentrates on clinical care, treatment patterns, and quality improvement within that hospital system. Because it only includes cases seen in those facilities, it doesn’t provide a complete picture of cancer in the broader population, so incidence and population survival estimates wouldn’t be reliable.

So the option that states population-based registries cover all cancer cases in a population for surveillance and enable incidence and survival estimates, while hospital-based registries collect data from hospitals for clinical/quality purposes, best captures the distinction. The other choices mix up the scope (one hospital vs entire population), coding systems, or focus on mortality versus incidence, which don’t reflect the fundamental difference.