Associations of hospital volume and hospital competition with short-term, middle-term and long-term patient outcomes after breast cancer surgery: a retrospective population-based study

OBJECTIVES: For oncological care, there is a clear tendency towards centralisation and collaboration aimed at improving patient outcomes. However, in market-based healthcare systems, this trend is related to the potential trade-off between hospital volume and hospital competition. We analyse the association between hospital volume, competition from neighbouring hospitals and outcomes for patients who underwent surgery for invasive breast cancer (IBC).

OUTCOME MEASURES: Surgical margins, 90 days re-excision, overall survival.

DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS: In this population-based study, we use data from the Netherlands Cancer Registry. Our study sample consists of 136 958 patients who underwent surgery for IBC between 2004 and 2014 in the Netherlands.

RESULTS: Our findings show that treatment types as well as patient and tumour characteristics explain most of the variation in all outcomes. After adjusting for confounding variables and intrahospital correlation in multivariate logistic regressions, hospital volume and competition from neighbouring hospitals did not show significant associations with surgical margins and re-excision rates. For patients who underwent surgery in hospitals annually performing 250 surgeries or more, multilevel Cox proportional hazard models show that survival was somewhat higher (HR 0.94). Survival in hospitals with four or more (potential) competitors within 30 km was slightly higher (HR 0.97). However, this effect did not hold after changing this proxy for hospital competition.

CONCLUSIONS: Based on the selection of patient outcomes, hospital volume and regional competition appear to play only a limited role in the explanation of variation in IBC outcomes across Dutch hospitals. Further research into hospital variation for high-volume tumours like the one studied here is recommended to (i) use consistently measured quality indicators that better reflect multidisciplinary clinical practice and patient and provider decision-making, (ii) include more sophisticated measures for hospital competition and (iii) assess the entire process of care within the hospital, as well as care provided by other providers in cancer networks.