Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Past
For the past 20 years, the cornerstone of cancer care has been the multidisciplinary tumour board (MTB), who meet regularly to discuss care for people with cancer. MTBs are valued, but the quality of their functionality is variable and affected by a number of factors from logistics to team composition, complexity of cases, and time and workload pressures.1,2 Methods have been established for assessing and improving the way MTBs work in their meetings. A number of tools currently exist that focus on different aspects of MTBs’ functionality.3 One such example is the Metric for the Observation of Decision-making (MODe). This was developed with a focus on assessing and improving MTBs’ decision-making and teamwork, but it can be cumbersome for use in routine clinical practice by healthcare staff.4 We set out to modify the MODe tool so that it could more readily be used by MTBs interested in assessing and improving the way they work.5
Present
The present study demonstrates good validity and reliability of the shorter version of MODe, namely MODe-LITE. It also shows that the learning curve for a novice user is shorter than for the original MODe tool. This implies that MODe-LITE could be used in routine clinical practice after a shorter period of training.5
Future
Future work should aim to digitalise MODe-LITE and other assessment tools for MTBs so that they can be undertaken using electronic devices, such as a tablet or smartphone, and integrated with electronic medical records. Digitisation would facilitate data collection and analysis. Further research is needed to validate MTB assessment tools for virtual or remote MTB meetings, which are more prevalent since outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Routine use of MTB assessment tools as part of quality improvement could improve decision-making and team working, ultimately translating to improved patient care.
References
Lamb BW, Brown KF, Nagpal K, Vincent C, Green JS, Sevdalis N. Quality of care management decisions by multidisciplinary cancer teams: a systematic review. Ann Surg Oncol. 2011;18(8):2116–25.
Soukup T, Lamb BW, Morbi A, et al. A multicentre cross-sectional observational study of cancer multidisciplinary teams: multilevel analysis of team decision-making across 3 tumours and 822 patients. Cancer Med. 2020;00:1–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/cam4.3366.
Soukup T, Lamb BW, Arora S, Darzi A, Sevdalis N, Green JS. Successful strategies in implementing a multidisciplinary team working in the care of patients with cancer: an overview and synthesis of the available literature. J Multidiscip Healthc. 2018;11:49.
Lamb BW, Miah S, Skolarus TS, Stewart GD, Green JSA, Sevdalis N, Soukup T. Development and validation of a short version of the Metric for the Observation of Decision-making in multidisciplinary tumor boards: MODe-LITE. Ann Surg Oncol. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1245/s10434-021-09989-7.
Lamb BW, Wong HW, Vincent C, Green JS, Sevdalis N. Teamwork and team performance in multidisciplinary cancer teams: development and evaluation of an observational assessment tool. BMJ Qual Saf. 2011;20(10):849–56.
Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge and are grateful for the contribution to the work of Professor Nick Sevdalis, Professor James S. A. Green, Professor Grant D. Stewart and Professor Ted A. Skolarus.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Disclosure
T.S.'s research is funded by the Welcome Trust and Diabetes UK. BWL and TS have previously received funding from Cancer Alliances and Health Education England for training cancer MDTs in assessment and quality improvement methods in the United Kingdom. TS also received fees from Roche Diagnostics for research services in relation to innovations for cancer MDTs in the United States of America.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Lamb, B.W., Miah, S. & Soukup, T. ASO Author Reflections: The Pursuit of Digitalised Quality Improvement Assessment Tools for Cancer Multidisciplinary Teams. Ann Surg Oncol 28, 7589–7590 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1245/s10434-021-09988-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1245/s10434-021-09988-8