Advances in the treatment of lung cancer: economic and organizational aspects.
The organizational optimization in radiotherapy tends to a correct balance of quality of service and containment of health care expenditure; this goal is necessarily correlated with the real potentialities available to each center while considering the possible clinical benefits for the patient. In lung cancer, outcomes achieved with radiation therapy are encouraging in terms of local control and survival when treatment is performed with the available modern technology whose costs from an exclusively economic analysis are shown to be still quite high. In an assessment focused on clinical outcomes, better local control, higher survival and improved quality of life represent tangible benefits: this has a positive impact on community costs and may represent a high priority goal for health care providers, yielding a benefit that can be quantified with the most recent analyses of health care economy.
Mantini
G
G
Divisione di Radioterapia, Università Cattolica del S. Cuore, Policlinico A. Gemelli, Roma, Italy.
Trodella
L
L
Balducci
M
M
Turriziani
A
A
Loffreda
M
M
Manfrida
S
S
D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000191:economics* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000532:radiotherapy*; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D011878:Radiotherapy / Q000191:economics