Deploying Team Science Principles to Optimize Interdisciplinary Lung Cancer Care Delivery: Avoiding the Long and Winding Road to Optimal Care

Abstract

The complexity of lung cancer care mandates interaction between clinicians with different skill sets and practice cultures in the routine delivery of care. Using team science principles and a case-based approach, we exemplify the need for the development of real care teams for patients with lung cancer to foster coordination among the multiple specialists and staff engaged in routine care delivery. Achieving coordinated lung cancer care is a high-priority public health challenge because of the volume of patients, lethality of disease, and well-described disparities in quality and outcomes of care. Coordinating mechanisms need to be cultivated among different types of specialist physicians and care teams, with differing technical expertise and practice cultures, who have traditionally functioned more as coactively working groups than as real teams. Coordinating mechanisms, including shared mental models, high-quality communication, mutual trust, and mutual performance monitoring, highlight the challenge of achieving well-coordinated care and illustrate how team science principles can be used to improve quality and outcomes of lung cancer care. To develop the evidence base to support coordinated lung cancer care, research comparing the effectiveness of a diverse range of multidisciplinary care team approaches and interorganizational coordinating mechanisms should be promoted.

Comprehensive Management and Coordination Mechanism of Marine Economy

“…rough the analysis and verification of the interaction stress relationship among the three subsystems of the marine eco-economic system, it can be seen that there are objectively various dynamic stress and constraint interaction relationships among the subsystems of China's marine eco-economic system [23,24]. With the help of system science theory, a dynamic coupling model is established to measure the coordination of the marine ecological-economic systems, and the development of 11 coastal and urban marine ecological-economic systems Mathematical Problems in Engineering under the pressure of systems is discussed quantitatively.…”

Effectiveness of Implemented Interventions on Pathologic Nodal Staging of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

“…This potential synergy between an intervention aimed at the surgery team, the nexus between surgery and pathology teams (the specimen collection kit) and another aimed directly at the pathology team (the novel gross dissection method) may suggest a collateral benefit in promoting healthy team-functioning among key members of the lung cancer care team by simplifying interdisciplinary interaction. 27…”

Pragmatic trial of a multidisciplinary lung cancer care model in a community healthcare setting: study design, implementation evaluation, and baseline clinical results

“…Lung cancer requires the active engagement of highly-trained, highlyskilled practitioners, using relatively high-cost, highrisk equipment and procedures to perform routine tasks required for diagnosis, staging, treatment and surveillance. Different specialists are often needed at each phase of care, which fragments care delivery (4,5).…”

“…The multidisciplinary care model involves multiple providers working consciously together as a team to provide care. However, what constitutes multidisciplinary cancer care has not been well defined, and its implementation has not been thoroughly studied (4,5).…”

“…Consequently, there is a wide gap between the consensus expert recommendation for multidisciplinary care, which makes intuitive sense, and real-world examples of wellexecuted, functional multidisciplinary oncology care programs. This poor penetration of multidisciplinary care is partly caused by a paucity of evidence to support the benefit, and near-absence of implementation know-how (4,5). There are few rigorous studies and little high-quality data to justify the resource investment and disruption of existing structures and relationships required to implement the multidisciplinary care model.…”