The Automated Central Tumor Registry (ACTUR) was established on May 5, 1986 by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs to satisfy Department of Defense and American College of Surgeon requirements for a comprehensive cancer data reporting system.

ACTUR was developed as part of the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) to facilitate inter-hospital usage by military beneficiaries, promote the cost savings associated with a single inter-hospital system, and provide the ability to produce automated reports and studies on a DoD-wide basis.

ACTUR was originally developed as muti-hospital data collection system only. However, a central registry function for the ACTUR data has recently been established at the AFIP and data from the year 1998 to the present is currently being edited and ready for upload and consolidation. Through implementation of this central registry function, we hope to be more responsive with quality research data for tracking and analyzing DoD total force and beneficiary cancer incidence trends.

The long-term vision for ACTUR is to link DoD cancer data with data from other applicable databases in order to track cancer data for all DoD beneficiaries across time.