I tumor board come strumento organizzativo per l’assistenza multidisciplinare e personalizzata: una revisione di scopo [Poster]

[Autom. eng. transl.] INTRODUCTION In the last twenty years, among the organizational tools widely used in hospital care for patients with cancer, there have been tumor boards (TB). The aims of the implementation of this tool, which involves at least two professionals from different disciplines, are the improvement of the clinical outcomes of patients and hospital performance and the reduction of variation in clinical practice. In order to identify the existing literature regarding the introduction of TB and their impact on the quality of care, assess the gaps and address future research on the topic, a review of purpose was carried out. MATERIALS AND METHODS Pubmed was queried through a search string consisting of keywords such as "cancer management", "tumor board", "multidisciplinary team *", "cancer MDT", "cancer care", "clinical decision-making" and "Outcome and process assessment", combined by Boolean operators. A search was also made through citations to enlarge the number of articles to be included. Systematic and extensive reviews on the impact of tumor boards in care for adult cancer patients were included. Articles prior to 1997 were excluded, not in English / Italian / French / Spanish, and fulltext was not available. RESULTS The research led to the identification of 16 revisions published between 2006 and 2018. Of these, 56% (9 reviews of which 3 systematic and 6 extensive) were not focused on a specific tumor, but analyzed the impact of tumor board on oncological hospital care in general. 13% of the reviews (2, of which 1 systematic and 1 extensive) were focused on the impact of TB in the management of lung cancer, while 19% (3 reviews, of which 1 systematic and 2 extensive) on cancer management of the gastrointestinal tract. Finally, 2 extensive reviews focused on the treatment of breast cancer and head and neck cancer, respectively. CONCLUSIONS From the present research of purpose it is clear that most of the selected studies, published mostly in the last decade, have investigated the impact of TB on cancer patients in general. Since this is an operational tool for the multidisciplinary and personalized treatment of complex patients, the implementation of TB should be encouraged and its impact should be assessed continuously thanks to both primary and secondary studies.