| The United States spends about 17% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare, the most of any industrialized nation. Oncology care alone accounts for 5-10% of this expenditure. Although the cancer survival data in the US are better than of most industrialized nations, the fact that healthcare expenditure is rising faster than the GDP makes the current situation unsustainable. In 2010 lung cancer accounted for 13% of the 124 billion dollars the USA spent on cancer care. Though survival for some patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer is improving with increasing use of targeted therapy, for the majority of patients it is still short but the amount of money spent treating them is quit high. With many different chemotherapy regimens to choose from , different threshold for individual clinicians to initiate and discontinue therapy as well as the lack of firm guidelines to image patients during treatment, we decided to study the cost and cost distribution of treating this patient population at our institution with the goal of identifying areas of waste reduction and improve efficiency. |
