Women often don’t receive all of the treatment they should after breast cancer surgery. But new research found that lumpectomy, also known as breast conserving surgery (BCS), plus radiation therapy delivered in a community setting leads to higher survival rates than the national average, when compared to other treatment options.

"There is a worrisome pendulum swing nowadays away from breast conserving surgery and radiation in situations that are still quite amenable to this approach," Dr. May Lin Tao, radiation oncologist at Vantage, said in a statement. “These data give excellent reassurance that patients can have superb survival results with this BCT [breast conserving therapy] rather than more aggressive surgical options.”

For the study, the researchers identified 1,172 patients diagnosed with T1-2, N0 breast cancer from 1997 to 2007 in the Providence St. Joseph Medical Center hospital tumor registry. They compared those results with the rates of patients who received BCT and radiation therapy in a similar population in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database.
They found that that rate of patients who underwent BCS was higher in the studied practice than the national average — 90.0 percent and 66.4 percent, respectively. The rate of patients who received radiation after BCS in the studied practice was 93.7 percent, and the national average was 74.4 percent.

But most importantly, the survival rate was higher among the patients treated with BCS plus radiation in the studied practice — at 92.5 percent — than the national rate at 82.4 percent.

This study was funded by Vantage Oncology and co-authored by the physicians and clinicians at Vantage Oncology and Valley Radiotherapy Associates Medical Group. It was recently published in The Journal of Community and Supportive Oncology.

Vantage’s affiliated physician practice in California called VRA recently partnered with Anthem Blue Cross of California to create a single episode-of-care payment for patients with breast cancer who need radiation therapy treatment.

“We feel one of the reasons we were able to partner with a large payor like Anthem was because we have demonstrated we can provide effective care at a sustainable cost,” Dr. Leslie Botnick, chief medical officer for Vantage Oncology, said in a statement. “This is appealing to a payor entity looking to make sure the level of care and patient satisfaction provided to its beneficiaries is high and value-based.”

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