The Anatomy and Physiology of Teaming in Cancer Care Delivery: A Conceptual Framework

Care coordination challenges for patients with cancer continue to grow as expanding treatment options, multimodality treatment regimens, and an aging population with comorbid conditions intensify demands for multidisciplinary cancer care. Effective teamwork is a critical yet understudied cornerstone of coordinated cancer care delivery. For example, comprehensive lung cancer care involves a clinical “team of teams”—or clinical multiteam system (MTS)—coordinating decisions and care across specialties, providers, and settings. The teamwork processes within and between these teams lay the foundation for coordinated care. Although the need to work as a team and coordinate across disciplinary, organizational, and geographic boundaries increases, evidence identifying and improving the teamwork processes underlying care coordination and delivery among the multiple teams involved remains sparse. This commentary synthesizes MTS structure characteristics and teamwork processes into a conceptual framework called the cancer MTS framework to advance future cancer care delivery research addressing evidence gaps in care coordination. Included constructs were identified from published frameworks, discussions at the 2016 National Cancer Institute-American Society of Clinical Oncology Teams in Cancer Care Workshop, and expert input. A case example in lung cancer provided practical grounding for framework refinement. The cancer MTS framework identifies team structure variables and teamwork processes affecting cancer care delivery, related outcomes, and contextual variables hypothesized to influence coordination within and between the multiple clinical teams involved. We discuss how the framework might be used to identify care delivery research gaps, develop hypothesis-driven research examining clinical team functioning, and support conceptual coherence across studies examining teamwork and care coordination and their impact on cancer outcomes.