Actual total hospital costs of primary localized prostate cancer treatments analyzed by risk group.

Abstract

e15164 Background: Radical prostatectomy (RP) and radiotherapy (RT) provide comparable HRQOL and oncologic outcomes of localized prostate cancer (PCa), yet no studies have evaluated their relative costs when investigated by risk group. We evaluated hospital costs associated with modern PCa therapies at a multidisciplinary program. Methods: Institutional billing data was queried for hospital patients from 2005 to 2009 with a primary admission for prostate cancer and primary procedure codes for RP, brachytherapy (BT), intensity modulated RT (IMRT) or combination treatment. All hospital costs related to the primary procedure were analyzed as assigned by the hospital. Costs were adjusted to 2009 USD and analyzed per patient and pretreatment D’Amico risk group. Results: 1969 localized PCa patients with a median age of 62 were identified with complete clinical information. There was a marked increase in the use of robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy (RALP) starting in 2007. The median total hospital costs for IMRT monotherapy ($16,673), BT+IMRT ($22,145) and RP+ adjuvant IMRT ($24,380) combination therapies were significantly higher than any other treatment type, although these patients had worse pathologic features. BT was the least expensive treatment with a total cost of $7,506, but was not routinely used as monotherapy for high-risk patients. The total cost of RALP ($7,676) was lower than open radical prostatectomy (RRP) ($8,991, p<0.001) and similar to laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (LRP) ($7,769).These trendsremained consistent when stratified by risk group (Table). Conclusions: In a high volume setting, RALP and BT are the least expensive modalities for treating low and intermediate risk PCa. For high risk patients, all forms of RP and IMRT alone were less expensive than combination therapy. [Table: see text]