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Background: Healthcare systems face challenges in optimizing resources while maintaining high-quality care. Breast cancer surgery represents a substantial share of elective surgery and provides an opportunity to evaluate different organizational models. This study presents a health economic analysis comparing two models for breast cancer surgery at the same hospital.

Methods: A bottom-up micro-costing approach was employed to evaluate potential cost-savings of breast cancer surgeries performed at a general surgical department (GS) versus a cardiothoracic surgery department (CT). We analyzed 543 consecutive patients undergoing elective breast cancer surgery between January 2014 and September 2016. Resource use was identified through direct observation, hospital administrative systems, and operating room logs. Personnel, disposables, medications, and facility costs were quantified based on observed resource use within the study dataset; no external benchmarking was performed.

Results: CT was less expensive, with an average saving of 3,547 Swedish krona (SEK) per operation (95% CI: -674 to 7,510 SEK). Bootstrap analysis with 1,000 iterations showed CT was less costly in 96.2% of samples. Procedures were shorter at CT (170.8 vs. 221.3 min), enabling more operations per day (3.2 vs. 2.4). In our deterministic simulation, removing CT capacity increased waiting times by 15%, from 39 to 45.1 days, conditional on steady inflow and constant OR availability. Annual savings at the observed annual volume (~ 192 patients) were 681,104 SEK and could reach ~ 1.77 million SEK if volumes increased to 500 patients/year.

Conclusions: The CT organizational model was more likely to be less costly while maintaining shorter waiting times. These findings suggest that CT capacity may be prioritized, particularly at higher patient volumes, to support both economic efficiency and patient access.