Understanding differences in total cancer care cost by service site.

Abstract

e18345 Background: Oncology providers are under mounting pressure to deliver high quality and increasingly complex cancer treatment while simultaneously managing the cost pressures coming from payers and patients alike. Developing an effective strategy to compare costs can be an important tool for assessing and improving performance and cost effectiveness from both a clinical and market competitive standpoint. This comparison can be difficult to achieve in practice, especially between different sites of care and across heterogeneous patient populations. Methods: A large commercial claims dataset with reimbursement data for claims incurred between 2014 and 2017 was used to identify lung cancer patients by site of care. We calculated average annual total cost of care (TCC) for a one year period for patients with a new cancer diagnosis following a one year period of no claims for lung cancer. For study purposes, Moffitt Cancer Center (MCC) was compared to two other peer groups: Large Hospital Systems (LHS) and small hospitals and community-based oncology practices (CBOP). Patients were assigned to each peer group when a majority of claims ( > 70%) were attributed to one of the peer groups. We analyzed overall average annual TCC for all patients and then created a sub-cohort of patients who received surgery within the study period to define early stage patients based on known standard patterns of care for newly diagnosed lung cancer. Results: There were 1249 new lung cancer patients in the study across all three peer groups with an average annual TCC of $134K per patient (range: $110K to $149K). When considering the sub-cohort of early stage patients (n = 396), MCC’s average annual TCC was $124K per patient which was significantly lower than LHS ($152K; p < 0.0499) and CBOP ($167K; p < 0.01). Conclusions: Although claims data generally contain only limited clinical information such as procedures, supplies and diagnosis, this limitation can be address by incorporating known standard of care patterns for cancer treatment to create comparable groups. Using this approach, national claims sets can be leveraged as the basis of a powerful analysis tool for understanding the Total Cost of Cancer care across institutional boundaries while still achieving meaningful comparability of the analyzed patient population.