Cost of Imaging Cancer Patients Rising Sharply
Last Updated: 2010-04-27 19:47:43 -0400 (Reuters Health)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The cost of imaging used on Medicare cancer patients is growing at twice the rate of overall cancer treatment,
Imaging is already the fastest growing expense for Medicare, but the study -- published April 28th in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- is the first to look specifically at the increasing use and cost of scans done on cancer patients.
The authors said use of positron emission tomography (PET) grew the fastest. PET scans cost six times more than computed tomography (CT) scans.
"As newer, more expensive imaging technologies are used more frequently, the overall cost of imaging is going to increase," said Michaela Dinan, a researcher at
Dinan and colleagues studied eight different imaging technologies used on roughly 100,000 Medicare patients who were newly diagnosed with various types of cancer between 1999 and 2006.
They found that while the overall treatment costs during a two-year period increased at a rate of 2% to 5% per patient, the cost of imaging those patients rose by 5% to 10% per patient.
"Imaging costs among Medicare beneficiaries with cancer increased from 1999 through 2006, outpacing the rate of increase in total costs among Medicare beneficiaries with cancer," the team wrote.
The cost of PET scans on average increased at an annual rate of 36% to 53%, but the overall number of PET scans stayed low, the team said.
Patients with lung cancer and lymphoma faced the highest imaging costs among all cancer patients - more than $3,000 on average during the first two years of treatment.
Although imaging costs are rising much more rapidly than other cancer treatment costs, imaging costs comprise only 6% of the total Medicare budget for cancer patients, the authors said.
Some policy experts have speculated that increased use of imaging among Medicare patients resulted from cost shifting after the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act slashed reimbursement rates for chemotherapy services.
But the increases may also be the result of the availability of more advanced technology.
"We definitely saw an increase in the most costly imaging services for patients with cancer. However, we can't determine whether the trends we observed were a direct response to the reimbursement changes in 2003," senior Dr. Kevin Schulman of Duke said in a statement.
He said use of imaging increased throughout the study period, both before and after the reimbursement changes.
JAMA 2010;303:1625-1631.
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