PORTLAND – Dozens of physicians in southern Maine are participating in an effort to create databases that could lead to better treatment for cancer patients.

The Maine Cancer Care Joint Venture involves four hospitals and about 70 doctors in 28 practices.

The goal is to allow doctors in Maine to compare the way they treat cancer with the medical practices of some of the nation’s top cancer centers. The project, now in its early stages, would eventually allow doctors to track patient outcomes and potentially use that information to improve

“Right now I have a sense of what drug programs are better than others, but I don’t have numbers, and I don’t know what my associates’ experience has been with that same drug program,” said Dr. Ronald Carroll of the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine in Scarborough. “This is a way of getting aggregate data from an entire practice for people with a specific disease – or a specific stage of disease – and actually learning the outcomes.”

Carroll has been trying to get other local doctors involved and link them to a national database through an affiliation with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a nonprofit alliance of 20 of the nation’s top cancer centers.

Large cancer centers routinely gather data that are used to track patient outcomes and improve treatment.

“This type of joint collection of data has really never been tried before on a community level,” said Dr. Richard Krull, an oncologist at Mercy Hospital who is participating in the project.

The hospitals participating in the project are Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital in Portland, Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford and Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick.

Meredith Burgess, a breast cancer survivor on the board of the Maine Cancer Research and Education Foundation, said the project would reassure patients that their experiences might help create something of value to others.

Burgess said she was surprised to learn that community cancer centers don’t already routinely collect the kind of information that will be gathered in this project.

“After you get over the fact that you just can’t believe it’s not been done before, you realize that it has to happen, and it has to happen now,” Burgess said. “It’s critical that this network be put in place, and that everybody cooperate with it. Physicians need to feel comfortable to feed their data into it, and patients need to encourage their physicians to participate.”

Krull counts himself among the skeptics who aren’t convinced that the databases will improve care by much. But Krull said Carroll convinced him it was worth trying.

“You can call this whole thing an interesting experiment that’s probably worthwhile to do, but how it’s going to impact cancer care in the community is yet to be seen,” Krull said.

Maine doctors began contributing to an NCCN breast cancer database in April. The database contains statistics from 6,000 to 7,000 patients who have been treated at NCCN-affiliated cancer centers.

The goal is to have information on 30,000 breast cancer patients.

Another database, for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, is in the works.

In Maine, Carroll would like to create state databases for melanoma, lung cancer, colon cancer and prostate cancer.