Multidisciplinary meetings have been become a key part of the management of complex diseases like cancer. As well as recording relevant input from medical and other healthcare professionals into decision making about individual cases they provide a significant opportunity for enhanced care coordination. They often have to function outside or across traditional organisational boundaries involving different hospitals, primary, secondary and tertiary care as well as the public and private sector. For this reason they require their own specific IT solution as organisationally based IT systems usually cannot span this range of stakeholders. The system needs to address both the traditional administrative functions of running any clinical case based meeting as well as recording and disseminating the specific information in a structured format about a particular disease like cancer and recommendations about its management. Information needs to be seamlessly retrieved from other IT systems for review at the meeting and the recommendations then need to be returned to an EHR or other medical record with the whole process being accessible to audit. It needs to be sufficiently flexible to adjust to advances in knowledge like the explosion of genomic information relevant to clinical decision-making in cancer.

Our IT system (MDMone) addresses all these issues and is based on business process management software which has been modified to mirror the clinical process involved in the operation of multidisciplinary meetings. The collaborative staging system is used so the system is sufficiently open-ended to cope with newly available information in cancer like genomics. It is web-based for reasons of accessibility and interoperable with other health care information repositories for both the purposes of receiving and sending clinical information.