Abstract
Objectives
To estimate awardee-specific costs of delivering breast and cervical cancer screening services in their jurisdiction and to assess potential variation in the cost of key activities across awardees.
Methods
We developed the cost assessment tool to collect resource use and cost data from the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program awardees for 3 years between 2006 and 2010 and generated activity-based cost estimates. We estimated awardee-specific cost per woman served for all activities, clinical screening delivery services, screening promotion interventions, and overarching program support activities.
Results
The total cost per woman served by the awardees varied greatly from $205 (10th percentile) to $499 (90th percentile). Differences in the average (median) cost per person served for clinical services, health promotion interventions, and overarching support activities ranged from $51 to $125.
Conclusions
The cost per woman served varied across awardee and likely reflected underlying differences across awardees in terms of screening infrastructure, population served, and barriers to screening uptake. Collecting information on contextual factors at the awardee, health system, provider, and individual levels may assist in understanding this variation in cost.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Wesley Crouse for his assistance in data collection.
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No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of this paper.
Funding
This study was funded by Contract Nos. 200-2002-00575 TO 06 and 200-2008-27958 TO 9 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the CDC.
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Subramanian, S., Ekwueme, D.U., Miller, J.W. et al. Awardee-specific economic costs of providing cancer screening and health promotional services to medically underserved women eligible in the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. Cancer Causes Control 30, 827–834 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-019-01174-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-019-01174-2