Variation in Use of Prostate Biopsy Following Changes in Prostate Cancer Screening Guidelines

Purpose: Prostate biopsy rates have paralleled decreasing prostate specific antigen screening rates since 2012. We hypothesized that biopsy rates and the change in rates since 2012 would vary considerably across hospital referral regions.Materials and Methods: Using Medicare data from 2012 through 2014 we identified prostate biopsies performed by physicians who performed 11 or more biopsies annually. We calculated annual biopsy rates and changes in rates from 2012 to 2014 across 306 hospital referral regions. We performed multivariable regression adjusting for factors associated with annual biopsy rates (eg percent of patients older than 75 who were screened with prostate specific antigen and percent of the population that was African American). We also estimated adjusted prostate biopsy rates and changes with time across regions.Results: We identified 395,993 biopsies. The overall rates decreased from 11.68 biopsies per 1,000 men in 2012 to 10.23 per 1,000 in 2014 (−12.4%, p = 0.11). Biopsy rates were hi...