Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Health care costs continue to steadily increase in Canada. Current health policy helps to worsen the health care crisis by increasing both access and cost to an inefficient system and fail to address the basic problem: an inability to deliver better patient outcomes at a lower total cost. This has led to a growing demand to identify ways that increase the cost-effectiveness of health care delivery in Canada. Establishing appropriate funding models for health care requires a full understanding of the link between cost and health system outcomes. This project will investigate health care costs and benefits from a surgical point of view. To this end, I will be performing a comparative check for the cost-effectiveness of trans-sphenoidal surgical resection of pituitary adenomas by endocrinologic subtype versus medical therapy. The study will involve a detailed review of the literature, as well as a multi-national, multi-institutional breakdown of the predictors and outcomes of pituitary tumor surgical intervention. Finally, the research study will involve the development of computerized analytical models to evaluate value of care for patients with pituitary adenomas by treatment strategy.