ALBANY — New York lawmakers passed a new measure yesterday meant to provide more clues in tracking environmental causes of cancer.

The bill, passed by both the Senate and Assembly, would require health care providers and the state to collect more data on cancer patients than the Centers for Disease Control mandates.

Sponsors of the legislation argue the Health Department could also do more to investigate cancer clusters with the data they already collect. If an environmental cause is identified, people in a cluster community could avoid potential disease.

“Once it’s all put together, what it’s going to show is, here you have pockets or areas where different types of former industrial sites that may have been related to some high incidences of cancer,” state Senator Thomas Libous, a Republican from Binghamton, said.

The Health Department currently collects information on what body part cancer appears in, what cell type, and how advanced the disease is, spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said. Officials also collect data on where cancer patients were born and where they currently live.

State officials and the American Cancer Society have raised concerns about the measure passed yesterday, saying it doesn’t require collecting information exhaustive enough to draw scientific conclusions.

It’s valuable to know the relationship between cancer and the environment, but “we have concerns about the limited use of cancer maps to do that and we have concerns about the ability of the registry to obtain the information,” a senior vice president of Cancer Control at the American Cancer Society, Dave Momrow, said.

Mr. Libous and Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat, introduced the bill.

“People will know, and scientists will know where the cancer clusters are, and begin to do the research to see if we can decide — why there?” Mr. Brodsky said.

The governor’s deputy secretary for health, Dennis Whalen, said Governor Paterson hadn’t seen the bill yet. Mr. Whalen said the executive branch is supportive of a cancer-mapping bill, but the legislative proposal needs to be strengthened.

“It is not a diagnostic tool,” Mr. Whalen said. “A cancer map can’t tell you what causes cancer, it can’t tell you in a certain area where you live or reside if you will get cancer, so it’s important to put into context whatever is produced so it is useful to the public.”

High profile cases have drawn attention to environmental links to illness. In Endicott, N.Y., the Health Department has found a disproportionate number of people had certain cancers and heart defects, but officials have not been able to pinpoint a cause.

Scientists first detected a chemical — trichloroethylene (TCE) — in the ground underneath residential and commercial property in 2003 near a former Canada Dry bottling plant. To date, TCE vapors have affected more than 700 properties, mostly in Endicott and the town of Union near a former IBM Corp. manufacturing site.