Cancer 2015 as one of the world’s largest prospective, longitudinal population-based clinical cohorts is ideally placed to produce much needed evidence on the prevalence of mutations, tumour heterogeneity, and the patterns and determinants of inherited cancer risk. While answers to these questions will help to improve our understanding of the disease and the clinical management of patients, it will be necessary to show that new testing and treatment approaches offer value-for-money, that they are cost-effective alternatives to current care.

 This component of Cancer 2015 is dedicated to producing evidence on both the costs and outcomes of cancer care. Patient reported outcome measures are included in the baseline and follow-up questionnaires of Cancer 2015, and patients have been asked to consent to have their Medicare and PBS records and state hospitalisation records linked. Notably, while linkage to the MBS/PBS is common, this is the first instance of the Victorian Department of Health linking an external dataset. Preliminary analysis of the baseline data suggests that there are some interesting patterns of outcomes and costs across different types, sites and stages of cancer, as well as for different patient demographics.

As well as quantifying the cost and outcomes (both survival and quality of life) of cancer, and providing an insight as to the determinants of these, including explanations of possible inequalities in care, the project will also estimate the value of new diagnostics and interventions.  For example, decision analytic models will be used to examine whether next generation sequencing as is being undertaken in the study (so called multiplex testing) offers greater benefits relative to the costs of our current testing approach.  The project will produce up-to-date comprehensive estimates of the cost of providing cancer care, and the outcomes across a range of cancer service delivery models, which will be informative for health care budgeting, service redesign and delivery.