Minor Thoughts from me to you

Specialization in cancer care could lead to better outcomes at the same price. Instead of having every hospital perform every procedure, it might be better to have hospitals specialize in different procedures.

“If all patients needing surgery for colon cancer were referred to hospitals that have consistently achieved mortality rates in the bottom half of all hospitals performing this operation, then the average mortality rate could fall from a rate of 3.8 percent to 2.4 percent,” Ho said. “And if all patients who require surgical resection for pancreatic cancer were referred to hospitals performing 11 or more of these operations per year, mortality rates could fall by half, from a rate of 6 percent to 3 percent.”

“We were concerned that the centralization of cancer care that would result from referring patients to a smaller set of higher-volume hospitals could give these hospitals additional market power to raise prices,” Ho said. “We also wondered whether higher-volume hospitals might have a different cost structure that would raise or lower costs per patient. We found no statistical evidence that hospitals that performed more of these cancer operations were able to charge higher prices to patients for these services. We found that costs per patient were indeed higher for hospitals performing more pancreatic cancer surgery. However, these higher costs were not passed on to patients as higher prices for patient care.”

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