IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/medema/v24y2004i6p602-613.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • 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)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Frank Kee & Tracy Owen & Ruth Leathem, 2004. "Decision Making in a Multidisciplinary Cancer Team: Does Team Discussion Result in Better Quality Decisions?," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 24(6), pages 602-613, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:medema:v:24:y:2004:i:6:p:602-613
    DOI: 10.1177/0272989X04271047
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X04271047
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0272989X04271047?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hinsz, Verlin B., 1999. "Group Decision Making with Responses of a Quantitative Nature: The Theory of Social Decision Schemes for Quantities, , , , , , , , , ," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 28-49, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alexandra Gheondea-Eladi, 2016. "The Evolution of Certainty in a Small Decision-Making Group by Consensus," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 127-155, January.
    2. Bonaccio, Silvia & Dalal, Reeshad S., 2006. "Advice taking and decision-making: An integrative literature review, and implications for the organizational sciences," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 101(2), pages 127-151, November.
    3. Kerr, Norbert L. & Niedermeier, Keith E. & Kaplan, Martin F., 1999. "Bias in Jurors vs Bias in Juries: New Evidence from the SDS Perspective, , , , , , , , ," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 70-86, October.
    4. Bonner, Bryan L. & Bolinger, Alexander R., 2013. "Separating the confident from the correct: Leveraging member knowledge in groups to improve decision making and performance," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 214-221.
    5. Christoph H. Loch & Kishore Sengupta & M. Ghufran Ahmad, 2013. "The Microevolution of Routines: How Problem Solving and Social Preferences Interact," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(1), pages 99-115, February.
    6. Buehler, Roger & Messervey, Deanna & Griffin, Dale, 2005. "Collaborative planning and prediction: Does group discussion affect optimistic biases in time estimation?," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 97(1), pages 47-63, May.
    7. Malcolm J. Beynon, 2006. "The Role of the DS/AHP in Identifying Inter-Group Alliances and Majority Rule Within Group Decision Making," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 21-42, January.
    8. Alexis Garapin & Daniel Llerena & Michel Hollard, 2011. "When a Precedent of Donation Favors Defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma," German Economic Review, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 12(4), pages 409-421, November.
    9. Ying Zhang, 2022. "Book review: The Impact of Individual Expertise and Public Information on Group Decision‐Making," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(8), pages 4167-4170, December.
    10. Kerr, Norbert L. & Tindale, R. Scott, 2011. "Group-based forecasting?: A social psychological analysis," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 14-40, January.
    11. Park, Guihyun & DeShon, Richard P., 2018. "Effects of group-discussion integrative complexity on intergroup relations in a social dilemma," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 62-75.
    12. Kerr, Norbert L. & Tindale, R. Scott, 2011. "Group-based forecasting?: A social psychological analysis," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 14-40.
    13. Nieboer, Jeroen, 2015. "Group member characteristics and risk taking by consensus," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 81-88.
    14. Steffen Keck & Wenjie Tang, 2021. "Elaborating or Aggregating? The Joint Effects of Group Decision-Making Structure and Systematic Errors on the Value of Group Interactions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(7), pages 4287-4309, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:medema:v:24:y:2004:i:6:p:602-613. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.