onkommon.com
Programme R11
Decision Science & Tumour Board Quality
What actually makes a cancer treatment decision good?
The problem
Tumour boards are assumed to improve care. How often they change management, in which patients, and whether the recommendation is then delivered, is rarely measured anywhere.
We intend to certify other centres against a standard of decision quality. A standard that rests on assertion rather than evidence is a marketing artefact.
The questions
- What makes a cancer treatment decision good, and can it be measured?
- How often do molecular tumour boards change management, and in which patients?
- Where board recommendations and delivered treatment diverge, why?
What we are contributing
We are studying our own decisions and publishing what we find, including where our board's recommendation was not followed and where it was wrong to begin with.
That is uncomfortable and it is the point. This programme is the certification business, the standard has to rest on published evidence about what board quality is and how it is measured, or it is worthless.
How the work is done
- Analysis of the institution's own board decision corpus
- Concordance and guideline-deviation studies
- Inter-rater and decision-quality methods
- Implementation research and audit methodology
What it runs on
- Our own retained board records
- Partner-network board records under agreement
- Delivered-treatment follow-up data
What it produces
- Decision-quality metrics
- Board-impact studies
- The published assessment framework behind the certification standard
- Implementation guidance for partner sites
Why it is not just science
How this changes care here
- Improves our own board
- Grounds the Certified Precision Oncology Centre standard
- Produces implementation guidance partners can actually use
Funding fit
Health-services research grants; quality-improvement and implementation funding.
What we are looking for
- Implementation-science collaborators
- Partner boards willing to be studied
- Funding for audit and analysis staff
Deliberately empty
Publications, funding and results
Nothing appears in this section until it exists in writing. No paper in preparation, no grant under review, no result not yet published. That rule applies with particular force to a research page.