Comparison of cost and time effectiveness between CT- and MRI-based radiotherapy workflow for prostate cancer

Abstract

The real costs of health care and their economic assessment have been expressed with a great urgency in an expanding dimension. In order to consider the value-based outcomes when measuring value, very accurate knowledge about health care delivery costs is required. The allocation of the rather scarce resources within public health care is of great importance in order to better utilize the resources without lowering care quality. The approach of this paper is multi-disciplinary, representing the field of health economics. The focus is in the assessment and evaluation of the costs of different simulation imaging modalities used in radiation therapy (RT) workflow. In this study, the costs of the computed tomography (CT) and the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are observed. In order to investigate the expenses as accurately as possible, the time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) is applied as a research method. The specific aim of this study is to find out potential advantages of the MRI-only simulation, as this method is not very widely applied in RT. This study is a research-in-progress, presenting only the theoretical argumentation and methods, meanwhile the collection and processing of the empirical data is in progress. The research is continuing, and the empirical findings will be added to the theoretical framework in a separate paper.