Cost trends for oncological renal surgery: support for a laparoscopic standard of care

There may be inherent costs associated with the cultivation of laparoscopic expertise. We compared the cost trends for laparoscopy during the development of our program with that of open surgery for renal neoplasms.

We retrospectively reviewed the records of 381 patients treated surgically for renal cortical neoplasms from 1998 to 2003. Demographic information and cancer specific data were recorded on each subject. Direct variable costs, which are directly traceable to the patient care service provided and vary with patient volume, were used to analyze cost. Temporal trends were assessed using multivariate models developed to determine smoothed mean costs by year.

Although it was initially more expensive, by 2003 mean costs were lower for laparoscopic than for open radical nephrectomy ($5,157 vs $5,808). This reflected a significantly lower annual increase in direct variable costs for laparoscopy vs open surgery even after adjustment for patient age, sex, race and clinical stage (p = 0.013). Although a similar trend was observed when comparing nephron sparing procedures vs open surgery, this did not attain statistical significance. In addition to surgical technique, only higher clinical stage was independently associated with increased direct variable costs after adjustment for operative year (p <0.0001).

Relative to their open counterparts the costs of laparoscopic treatment of renal cortical neoplasms have increased at a lower rate in the last 6 years. When considered in the context of the well established benefits of laparoscopy, our findings lend additional support in favor of laparoscopy as the standard of care.