Measuring the quality of multi-disciplinary thoracic oncology care

As a result of the rapid acceleration in new treatment advances in thoracic oncology, coordination and tailored selection of treatment modalities has become complex. This increasing complexity mandates multidisciplinary input and coordinated management. However, quality of care in the domain of multidisciplinary thoracic oncology has yet to be purposefully defined, and as a result the science of performance measurement has yet to be applied to this area. In this review we discuss the role of multidisciplinary care in thoracic oncology, and outline its definitions as proposed in the literature. We review various metrics of quality in complex multidisciplinary thoracic oncology care, and future directions for quality and performance measurement.