Breast Cancer: Treatment, Outcomes, and Cost-Effectiveness
Abstract
The goal of this project is to (1) assess the validity of medical claims information for tracking breast cancer diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes; (2) use Medicare data, linked SEER cancer registry data, and claims data from large firms to analyze trends in diagnosis rates and staging, treatment, expenditures, and outcomes for Americans with breast cancer; and (3) analyze the cost effectiveness of alternative patterns of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. A principal cause of the limited evidence on trends and cost-effectiveness of cancer care for the elderly is the absence of precise information on the utility of medical claims databases for understanding cancer epidemiology, treatments, costs, and outcomes in large, representative population groups. To date, the project has made substantial progress in (1) constructing a set of rules for identifying cancer cases in administrative data with much higher sensitivity and specificity estimates and more accurate time of diagnosis estimates than previously reported; and (2) demonstrating the feasibility on breast cancer of an important methodological step (instrumental variables) necessary for attributing differences in outcomes to treatment differences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1998
- Accession Number
- ADA353844
Entities
People
- Mark B. Mcclellan
Organizations
- National Bureau of Economic Research