Source: MedScape.comBy Will Boggs, MDPublished: September 9, 2013 NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Sep 09 - An increasing proportion of head and neck cancers is being treated at teaching hospitals and academic centers - which may be good news for patients, and bad news for the hospitals. "Higher volume centers end up doing more complex work," Dr. Eliot Abemayor from David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, California told Reuters Health by email. "Since more specialized centers are doing this work, they cannot be held accountable to having poorer outcomes per se since the patients in general are the sickest and most complex." The care of patients with head and neck cancer is labor intensive and expensive, and over the past decade, a greater number of patients seem to be receiving care at teaching hospitals and academic institutions than at local or community-based institutions. In an effort to document this trend and its implications, Dr. Abemayor and Dr. Neil Bhattacharyya from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston used data from the Nationwide In-patient Sample for the calendar years 2000, 2005, and 2010, which included roughly 29,000, 33,500, and 37,500 inpatient hospital head and neck cancer stays, respectively. This trend represents an increase of approximately 29% over the three study years, the researchers note. These data demonstrated a significant increase in the proportion of stays for teaching hospitals, from 61.7% in 2005 to 79.8% in 2010 (p<0.001). At the same time, the number of admissions to medium- bed-size hospitals for head [...]