Decision Making in a Multidisciplinary Cancer Team: Does Team Discussion Result in Better Quality Decisions?

Frank Kee, Tracy Owen and Ruth Leathem
Additional contact information
Frank Kee: Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast
Tracy Owen: Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast
Ruth Leathem: Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast

Medical Decision Making, 2004, vol. 24, issue 6, 602-613

Abstract: To establish whether treatment recommendations made by clinicians concur with the best outcomes predicted from their prognostic estimates and whether team discussion improves the quality or outcome of their decision making, the authors studied real-time decision making by a lung cancer team. Clinicians completed pre- and postdiscussion questionnaires for 50 newly diagnosed patients. For each patient/doctor pairing, a decision model determined the expected patient outcomes from the clinician’s prognostic estimates. The difference between the expected utility of the recommended treatment and the maximum utility derived from the clinician’s predictions of the outcomes (the net utility loss) following all potential treatment modalities was calculated as an indicator of quality of the decision. The proportion of treatment decisions changed by the multidisciplinary team discussion was also calculated. Insofar as the change in net utility loss brought about by multidisciplinary team discussion was not significantly different from zero, team discussion did not improve the quality of decision making overall. However, given the modest power of the study, these findings must be interpreted with caution. In only 23 of 87 instances (26%) in which an individual specialist’s initial treatment preference differed from the final group judgment did the specialist finally concur with the group treatment choice after discussion. This study does not support the theory that team discussion improves decision making by closing a knowledge gap.

Keywords: decision making; multidisciplinary; team; cancer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X04271047 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:24:y:2004:i:6:p:602-613

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X04271047

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().