Background Case management (CM) is widely utilized to improve health outcomes of cancer patients, enhance their experience of health care, and reduce the cost of care. While numbers of systematic reviews are available on the effectiveness of CM for cancer patients, they often arrive at discordant conclusions that may confuse or mislead the future case management development for cancer patients and relevant policy making. We aimed to summarize the existing systematic reviews on the effectiveness of CM in health-related outcomes and health care utilization outcomes for cancer patient care, and highlight the consistent and contradictory findings. Methods An umbrella review was conducted followed the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Umbrella Review methodology. We searched MEDLINE (Ovid), EMBASE (Ovid), PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Scopus for reviews published up to July 8th, 2022. Quality of each review was appraised with the JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist for Systematic Reviews and Research Syntheses. A narrative synthesis was performed, the corrected covered area was calculated as a measure of overlap for the primary studies in each review. The results were reported followed the Preferred reporting items for overviews of systematic reviews checklist. Results Eight systematic reviews were included. Average quality of the reviews was high. Overall, primary studies had a slight overlap across the eight reviews (corrected covered area = 4.5%). No universal tools were used to measure the effect of CM on each outcome. Summarized results revealed that CM were more likely to improve symptom management, cognitive function, hospital (re)admission, treatment received compliance, and provision of timely treatment for cancer patients. Overall equivocal effect was reported on cancer patients’ quality of life, self-efficacy, survivor status, and satisfaction. Rare significant effect was reported on cost and length of stay. Conclusions CM showed mixed effects in cancer patient care. Future research should use standard guidelines to clearly describe details of CM intervention and its implementation. More primary studies are needed using high-quality well-powered designs to provide solid evidence on the effectiveness of CM. Case managers should consider applying validated and reliable tools to evaluate effect of CM in multifaced outcomes of cancer patient care.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Background Comprehensive mutation profiling has become a standard clinical practice in the management of advanced lung cancer. In addition to tissue and plasma, other body fluids are also being actively explored as alternative sources of tumor DNA. In this study, we investigated the potential of induced sputum obtained from patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) for mutation profiling. Methods Capture-based targeted sequencing was performed on matched tumor, plasma, and induced sputum samples of 41 treatment-naïve patients with NSCLC using 168 gene panel. Results Comparative analysis on the mutation detection using matched tumor sample as reference revealed detection rates of 76.9% for plasma, 72.4% for sputum-supernatant, and 65.7% for sputum-sediment samples. Plasma, sputum-supernatant, and sputum-sediment achieved positive predictive values of 73.3%, 80.4%, and 55.6% and sensitivities of 50.0%, 36.9%, 31.3%, respectively, relative to tumor samples for 168 genes. Sputum-supernatants had significantly higher concordance rates relative to matched tumor samples (69.2% vs 37.8%; P = 0.031) and maximum allelic fraction (P < 0.001) than its matched sputum-sediments. Sputum-supernatants had comparable detection rates (71.4% vs. 67.9%; P = 1) but with significantly higher maximum allelic fraction than their matched plasma samples (P = 0.003). Furthermore, sputum-supernatant from smokers had a significantly higher maximum allelic fraction than sputum-supernatant from non-smokers (P = 0.021). Conclusions Our study demonstrated that supernatant fraction from induced sputum is a better sampling source than its sediment and has comparable performance as plasma samples. Induced sputum from NSCLC patients could serve as an alternative media for next-generation sequencing-based mutation profiling.