The impact of multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTMs) in cancer care: evidence from an umbrella review [Poster display]

Background: In the last 20 years, MDTMs have been broadly applied in cancer care. This organizational tool was thought to optimize patient outcomes and to improve care performance. The aim of the present work was to summarize the available evidence on MDTMs impact on patient outcomes and clinical processes. Methods: An umbrella review was performed. Medline was investigated using a string search including key words such as ‘‘cancer management’’, ‘‘tumor board’’, ‘‘multidisciplinary team’’, ‘‘cancer MDT’’, ‘‘cancer care’’, ‘‘clinical decision-making’’ and ‘‘outcome and process assessment’’ combined with Boolean operators. To enlarge the number of article a search through citations was carried out. Only reviews on cancer MDTs were considered. Narrative and extensive reviews were excluded. Two researchers were entitled to synthetize studies retrieved and to assess their quality through the AMSTAR2 tool. Results: 4 systematic reviews were retrieved. Except one that was published on 2008, all the other three reviews were published between 2015 and 2017. One review was focused on gastrointestinal cancers and included 16 studies; another one was centered on lung cancer and included 16 studies; while the remaining two, not focused on a specific tumor disease, included 27 and 51 studies. Due to studies heterogeneity, the results of the selected reviews were presented in a narrative way. Two reviews highlighted studies fairness. All the reviews reported changes in diagnosis (and/or the probability to receive a more accurate diagnosis). Improvement in clinical and process outcomes and in survival was observed in the review containing 51 studies. Conclusions: The preliminary results of our study showed that the effectiveness of MDTMs could be influenced by several factors that can be related both to the organization and to the type and stage of the tumor considered. Further studies have to reinforce existing literature and to investigate patients’ satisfaction and quality of life. Key messages: Multidisciplinary team meetings have to be further promote as an example of integrated and patient-centered care from diagnosis to follow-up. As a broad professional involvement, multidisciplinary team implementation may be relevant in order to delivery complex and high-quality care in a hospital setting.