Impact of primary care provider density on detection and diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma

Nathaniel H Fleming, Madeline M Grade and Eran Bendavid

PLOS ONE, 2018, vol. 13, issue 7, 1-11

Abstract: Introduction: Early diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma is critical in preventing melanoma-associated deaths, but the role of primary care providers (PCPs) in diagnosing melanoma is underexplored. We aimed to explore the association of PCP density with melanoma incidence and mortality. Methods: All cases of cutaneous melanoma diagnosed in the United States from 2008–2012 and reported in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database were analyzed in 2016. County-level primary care physician density was obtained from the Area Health Resources File (AHRF). We conducted multivariate linear regression using 1) average annual melanoma incidence or 2) average annual melanoma mortality by county as primary outcomes, adjusting for demographic confounders and dermatologist density. Cox proportional hazard regression was conducted using individual outcome data from SEER with the same covariates. Results: Across 611 counties, 167,305 cases of melanoma were analyzed. Per 100,000 people, an additional 10 PCPs per county was associated with 1.62 additional cases of melanoma per year (95% CI 1.06–2.18, p

Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200097 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 00097&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0200097

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200097

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().