Impact of COVID-19 in the screening and treatment of breast cancer in the Brazilian public health system: Data from a healthcare data warehouse.

Abstract

e18807 Background:Since December 2019, the world is facing a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). We sought to analyze the behavior of cancer treatments and procedures in breast cancer in Brazil after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic through an artificial intelligence platform with real life data. Methods:Data evaluation was performed using the TechTrials platform. This platform created a unique healthcare data warehouse containing hundreds of different publicly available data sources about Brazilian Public Health System and with proprietary technology, developed several analytics products that explore and release real-world data (RWD) insights. For this analysis data were extracted from DATASUS – SIA (outpatients information system). For each outcome, data from January 2011 to February 2020 were used to adjust a time series to predict values for March to November 2020. Those values were compared with the observed ones. Results: Biopsies, mammograms and procedures showed a sharp decrease (41.9%, 73.7% and 31.1%, respectively), in April 2020 (following month of the first COVID-19 case in Brazil) with some recovering in the following months. All observed values of biopsies, the number of mammograms from March to October and the number of procedures in April and May were significantly smaller than the predicted ones. Number of women undergoing chemotherapy began to decline in August and remained falling until the last month of available data.(Table). Conclusions: This study is the first one that analyzes RWD of breast cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment in Brazil as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of the decrease observed in screening and diagnosis is already evident in the number of women undergoing chemotherapy. These data will continue to be monitored in the coming months when only then will data be available for staging at diagnosis.[Table: see text]