Sustainable Cancer Care: Enhancing Value and Managing Costs

The global rise in cancer incidence and increased survival rates have led to escalating healthcare costs. This thesis aimed to answer the question, 'How can we ensure sustainable and high-value oncological care in the face of rising demand and costs?'. We explored two important cost drivers (comorbidity and expensive drugs). Comorbidities prevalence is high and will increase over time, while expensive drugs result in survival benefits but at a substantial increase in costs. Furthermore, we explored how we can maximise value in oncological care with limited budgets and we suggest different strategies that can contribute to this aim. Lastly, we studied comprehensive cancer networks as an alternative approach for organising oncological care to potentially increase sustainability. Additionally, this thesis provides different recommendations to enhance the long-term sustainability of oncological care. These entail comorbidity management, methods for suppressing expensive drug costs, addressing patient-values in patient-level decision making, stimulating optimal ways for oncological networking, and improving data availability for research. More research is still needed to fully answer our main research question(s).