Despite that most patients with newly diagnosed prostate cancer receive high-quality care, a racial disparity exists, a study published in the journal Cancer has shown.1
Because meeting quality of care standards in oncology is important to physicians, professional organizations, and payers, researchers sought to assess whether receipt of care was consistent with previously reported consensus metrics and whether receipt of high-quality care correlated with less patient-reported treatment decisional regret.
For the study, investigators analyzed data from 804 patients with incident prostate cancer who were enrolled in collaboration with the North Carolina Central Cancer Registry. This sample included an oversampling of minority patients.
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Receipt of high-quality care was based on 5 standards: discussion of all treatment options, complete workup, low-risk participants did not undergo a bone scan, high-risk participants treated with radiation treatment received androgen deprivation therapy, and participants treated with radiotherapy received conformal or intensity-modulated radiation treatment.
Results showed that 73% of white patients received care that met all 5 standards compared with 66% of African American participants (P =.03).
Researchers also found that patients who had all treatment options discussed with them reported less decisional regret (P =.03), demonstrating the first identified association between a quality of care metric and patient-reported outcome.
Reference
1. Holmes JA, Bensen JT, Mohler JL, Song L, Mishel MH, Chen RC. Quality of care received and patient-reported regret in prostate cancer: analysis of a population-based prospective cohort. Cancer. 2016 Sep 13. doi: 10.1002/cncr.30315. [Epub ahead of print]
