Session Item

Brachytherapy is known to be a “cost effective” treatment relative to external beam radiation therapy for several different disease sites.  Determining the “costs” of treatment are variable depending on how you define them.  Time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) is a methodology that quantifies and aggregates all resources utilized throughout a full cycle of patient care.  It can help determine the true costs to the system for any given treatment.  The purpose of this session is to review TDABC methodology and recent data using this technique to evaluate the costs of brachytherapy versus other treatment modalities in prostate, gynecologic, and breast cancers.