ArticleForum for health economics & policy2012
Can Centralization of Cancer Surgery Improve Social Welfare?
Article in Forum for health economics & policy, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Good and Bad of Regionalizing Colon Cancer Care.Clinics in colon and rectal surgery · 2025Review
- Patterns of Referral for Common Cancer Surgery in the United States.Annals of surgical oncology · 2025Article
- Comparison of Simulated Outcomes of Colorectal Cancer Surgery at the Highest-Performing vs Chosen Local Hospitals.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Simulated data-driven hospital selection for surgical treatment of well-differentiated thyroid cancer in older adults.Surgery · 2023Article
- Article
- Association of Hospital Market Concentration With Costs of Complex Hepatopancreaticobiliary Surgery.JAMA surgery · 2017Article
- Measuring the Volume-Outcome Relation for Complex Hospital Surgery.Applied health economics and health policy · 2016Article
- Impact of processes of care aimed at complication reduction on the cost of complex cancer surgery.Journal of surgical oncology · 2015Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The empirical association between high hospital procedure volume and lower mortality rates has led to recommendations for the centralization of complex surgical procedures. Yet redirecting patients to a select number of high-volume hospitals creates potential negative consequences for market competition. We use patient-level data to estimate the association between hospital procedure volume and patient mortality and costs. We also estimate the association between hospital market concentration and mortality, cost, and prices. We use our estimates to simulate the change in social welfare resulting from redirecting patients at low-volume hospitals to high-volume facilities. We find that a higher procedure volume leads to significant reductions in mortality for patients undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer, but not colon cancer. Procedure volume also influences costs for both surgeries, but in a nonlinear fashion. Increased market concentration is associated with higher costs and prices for colon cancer, but not pancreatic cancer patients. Simulations indicated that centralizing pancreatic cancer surgery is unambiguously welfare enhancing. In contrast, there is less evidence to suggest that centralizing colon cancer surgery would be welfare improving.
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Registered trials
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