Is less more? The association between hospital volume and low-value breast cancer surgeries.

Abstract

68 Background: Hospital volume is often equated with surgical quality. In breast surgical oncology, higher hospital volume has been associated with higher overall survival rates, but whether it is a proxy for quality with respect to low-value care remains unexplored. We thus examined the association between hospital volume and the use of three breast surgeries identified as low-value by the Choosing Wisely campaign. Methods: Patients with stage 0-III unilateral breast cancer diagnosed from 2013-2016 were identified in the National Cancer Database. The outcomes of interest were: 1) contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM), 2) axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) for breast conserving therapy (BCT) patients with cT1-2N0 disease and <2 positive nodes, and 3) sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) in women >70 years old with cT1N0 hormone receptor-positive (HR+) cancer. Multivariable regression models with restricted cubic splines were used to examine the association between annual hospital volume and outcomes of interest, after adjusting for patient-, disease-, and hospital-level risk factors. Results: Overall, 13.6% of 841,610 women with unilateral Stage I-III breast cancer underwent CPM, 9.2% of 832,205 BCT patients with clinical T1-T2N0 disease underwent ALND, and 85.7% of women >70 years of age with cT1N0 HR+ cancer underwent SLNB over the study period. In adjusted analyses that defined hospital volume by decile, patients treated in the first and tenth decile hospitals had lower odds of undergoing CPM as compared to those treated in the middle deciles (Table). BCT patients with cT1-2N0 disease treated in hospitals in the first and second decile had higher odds of undergoing an ALND than patients treated at higher volume hospitals. Hospital volume did not have an overall significant association with SLNB use in women >70 years old with cT1N0 HR+ disease. Conclusions: The relationship between hospital volume and performance of low-value breast surgeries differed for each Choosing Wisely recommendation, indicating that hospital volume is not a reliable proxy for quality with respect to low-value practices. Additional studies to identify practice-specific deimplementation strategies are needed. [Table: see text]