One-stop breast clinic provides timely care to worried patients

After a positive breast cancer screening, patients need a fast diagnosis. Can one-stop diagnostic clinics do the trick? A one-stop breast clinic for individuals with suspect breast lesions opened in France in 2004, aiming to provide patients with a proper diagnosis by the end of the day of their visit. Researchers analyzed eight years of data from the clinic, sharing their findings in the European Journal of Cancer.

Overall, more than 10,600 patients were treated by the clinic from 2004 to 2012. Sixty-nine percent of the patients had masses, and the other 31 percent had “micro-calcifications or other non-mass lesions.” Three out of four patients received a full diagnosis on the same day, and that number is 87 percent when just looking at patients with masses.

In addition, the mean time from phone call to clinic visit was 14 days, and the median time spent at the clinic was six hours.

The authors also examined the clinic’s diagnostic accuracy. Diagnostic sensitivity was more than 98 percent, and specificity was 99.8 percent. A total of sixty-three patients had a false negative result, and 12 patients had a false positive result.

“We did not evaluate the accuracy of a single technique, but rather that of a whole one-stop process dedicated to any type of suspect breast lesion,” wrote Suzette Delaloge, MD MSc, department of medical oncology at Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France, and colleagues. “The overall diagnostic accuracy of this one-stop process appears very high, in line with the best described results of breast centres.”

Delaloge et al. also noted that the clinic isn’t just efficient; it also helps bring cancer care to more patients.

“One of the reasons national screening programmes partially fail is insufficient attendance,” the authors wrote. “This seems to be partially due to a lower attendance of women with lower income and poorer social status. The availability of this kind of ‘public’ one-stop clinic coupled to screening programmes could also potentially improve women's perception of mammographic screening and attendance.”

Imaging leaders may be especially interested to know that the mean cost to the hospital per patient from 2004 to 2012 was approximately $472. As one may expect, that cost varied; malignant lesions cost the hospital more than treatment for benign lesions.

Delaloge added that their study did have limitations. It includes results from just one clinic, for instance, instead of a wide range of facilities from different locations.