SAN ANTONIO, May 31, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- False-positive breast biopsies in the United States cost the healthcare system more than $2 billion per year, according to findings released from a new study in ClinicoEconomics and Outcomes Research, conducted by a team of health outcomes research scientists at IBM Watson Health™ in collaboration with Seno Medical's Chief Medical Officer, A. Thomas Stavros, MD.

The study analyzed recent data focusing on diagnostic breast imaging, biopsies, and other diagnostic procedures performed for patients recalled for follow-up after suspicious findings from initial screening mammography or breast examination. Such follow-up procedures are ordered by clinicians largely because current tools often cannot provide diagnostic certainty in identifying cancerous breast masses. The study looked at how often the follow-up procedures were performed, on what volume of patients, the most common sequences in which the procedures were performed, and the associated costs.

Data was collected from a nationally representative sample of 875,000 adult women using real-world encounters from health care claims data from 2011 to 2015, and then projected nationally to estimate that more than 12 million women in the US received follow-up exams each year after suspicious findings. Based on actual payer claims for the women studied, 53.3% of such patients received diagnostic mammograms, 42.4% received diagnostic breast ultrasounds, and 10.3% received biopsies after initial diagnostic procedures. Total costs for these procedures were projected at:
$3.05 billion for diagnostic mammograms (average cost $349)
$0.92 billion for diagnostic breast ultrasounds (average cost $132)
$3.07 billion for biopsies (average cost $1,938)
Combined with other follow-up imaging procedures (e.g., tomosynthesis, MRI, others), the data totals nearly $8 billion spent annually for follow-up breast diagnostic procedures.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in females, and it is estimated that 266,120 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women in 2018.2 Survival rates have increased steadily over recent decades as earlier detection enables treatment at earlier stages when treatment is more effective and less costly. However, many organizations differ on timing (annually, bi-annually) and ages for screening (to begin at age 40 or 50 years, screening after age 74 years), with varying opinions on how to best balance breast cancer screening costs with rates of detection, rates of false-positives or over diagnoses, and reduction in mortality.1

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