OBJECTIVES: Planning and designing patient registries requires significant research to determine the type and amount of data to collect, identifying recruitment sites, understanding the impact of study criteria on sample size, and estimating patient retention.  Our objective was to test the utility of a new tool for answering these questions in a timely and cost-efficient manner, and to examine how claims data can be leveraged to plan registry design. METHODS: We used an online interactive data analysis tool, MarketScan®Treatment Pathways, to explore the characteristics and healthcare utilization patterns in a sample of cancer patients with pain.  Patients newly diagnosed with prevalent cancers that are highly associated with pain such as multiple myeloma, colorectal, lung, prostate, or breast cancer were included, if they had at least 2 ICD-9 codes for one of the cancers on different days within 60 days of each other.  A 6-month pre-period without any cancer diagnosis was used to identify new cancer patients. RESULTS: Of the 365,980 cancer patients meeting the entry criteria, 54% had an ICD-9 code for pain-related diagnosis.  The median and mean number of days from cancer to pain diagnosis was 113 and 192 days, respectively.  Only 3% had a co-morbidity that would exclude participation in the registry.  Nearly 64% patients had an outpatient office visit within 30-days, of them, 68% had a subsequent visit in the following 30-days.  Patient diagnoses, medications and procedures were described for the 60-day period following cancer pain diagnosis.  The full analysis took 6 hours including all iterations on study criteria, and outputting descriptive data on patient demographic and clinical characteristics.  CONCLUSIONS: Using MarketScan®Treatment Pathways, we tested sample selection criteria and healthcare utilization in a fraction of time than typical database analyses.  These data answered critical questions in the study design for a planned cancer pain registry in a timely and cost-efficient way.