Follow-Up after Curative Surgery for Colorectal Cancer

For most surgeons postoperative follow-up comes naturally after primary surgery, but reliable evidence that this process improves overall survival is lacking. Despite tight resources follow-up remains routine. A 1995 US survey of different follow-up regimens showed a wide range of costs for five years of follow-up per patient (1); the cheapest they found was $900, while the most expensive was nearly $27,000. With a million follow-up visits generated by each year’s cohort of new US cases, this amounts to billions spent, but for what benefit?