Catchment Areas of NCI-Designated
Cancer Centers

This web-based application serves as a visualization tool for the geographically defined catchment areas of NCI-designated Cancer Centers. The 'catchment area' refers to the self-defined geographic area that each NCI-designated Cancer Center serves or intends to serve in the research it conducts, the communities it engages, and the outreach it performs.

NCI-designated Cancer Centers use geographic units (census tracts, zip codes, county or state lines, or other boundaries) to define the area from which the Cancer Center draws the majority of its patients, including the local area surrounding the Cancer Center. The catchment area provides a geographic scope for monitoring cancer trends, identifying pronounced socioeconomic- and health-related disparities, informing high impact translational science, and guiding the implementation of evidence-based interventions in clinical and community settings.

The status of 'NCI Designation' is awarded to Cancer Centers that receive the P30 Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG), which is administered by the NCI Office of Cancer Centers. The P30 CCSG supports a diverse, nationwide network of cancer centers that meet rigorous standards of achievement in transdisciplinary, state-of-the-art research to prevent, detect, and treat cancer. For more information about the NCI Cancer Centers Program, visit cancercenters.cancer.gov.

This web-based application visualizes locations and geographic extent of 63 catchment areas of the 71 NCI-designated Cancer Centers, as of May 2021, their population estimates, and cancer mortality information. The seven NCI-designated basic laboratory centers are excluded because they are not required to identify a catchment area. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is also excluded because its unique mission is solely devoted to pediatric cancers. Although the NCI-designated University of Hawaii Cancer Center catchment area includes the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands, the statistics for the catchment population were reported using the state of Hawaii only, due to limitations of the underlying dataset. The web application will continue to evolve, geographically linking Cancer Centers’ catchment areas to publicly available data sources to aggregate sociodemographic and epidemiologic characteristics across the NCI Cancer Centers Program.

Please note: these visualization efforts are not NCI policy statements and should not be interpreted as such.

If you use the information provided by this application, please include the following citation, which describes the development of the NCI-designated Cancer Center catchment areas dataset:
DelNero PF, Buller ID, Jones RR, Tatalovich Z, Vanderpool RC, Ciolino HP, Croyle RT. A National Map of NCI-Designated Cancer Center Catchment Areas on the 50th Anniversary of the Cancer Centers Program. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2022 May 4;31(5):965-71. DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-21-1230External Web Site Policy, PMID: 35101903

Datasets

Statistics available in this application were updated on April 25, 2023 and are presented for download here:

You can also download the Catchment Area and US County shapefiles for use in your own projects:

The county dataset also includes and Urban-Rural designation based on the 2013 Rural-Urban Continuum Code provided by the USDA. Counties with RUCC 1-3 are displayed as Urban, while those with codes 4-9 are Rural.

On January 25th, 2023 race population selections were removed from the 2016-2020 demographics dataset. The race by-group selections were found to be inconsistent between Catchment Area and County level aggregation, making the resulting statistics not directly comparable. These variables have been restored with the release of 2017-2021 demographic data.

NCI Designated Cancer Center List

The following is a list of the cancer centers included in the application. Type in the search box to limit the rows displayed. Click on a cancer center name to open the application zoomed to the corresponding catchment area.


Additional Resources

These are links to external websites which provide more information concerning Catchment Areas:


Contact Us

Please contact usif you have information on these Cancer Centers or suggestions for the application.