Online Program

Rising cancer costs and steadily improving outcomes: how are they related? (307880)

Keywords: cost-effectiveness, observational data, oncology, health outcomes, seer-medicare, survival analysis

Cancer-specific costs have been rising over the past few decades as outcomes of cancer treatment have steadily improved. The relationship between costs and survival from a cost-effectiveness standpoint is of interest. We used 2005-2016 claims data from the SEER-Medicare linkage to conduct longitudinal analyses of medical care costs and survival among cancer patients across varying sites and disease stages. Payments by Medicare, a federal health insurance program in the United States primarily for persons ages 65 and older, were used as a proxy for medical care costs. A 5% non-cancer sample was used as a control group to isolate cancer-specific costs and survival by subtracting out baseline trends in cost and baseline trends in survival from the cancer patient population. This talk will focus on an examination and comparison of various methods of estimating the relationship between cancer-related costs and survival changes over time. These methods include a naïve approach that takes the difference in cost and survival from matched cancer and non-cancer patients as well as multiple adaptations of previously developed methods to create cost estimates weighted by survival probability.