Cover Memo_9-5-2013

Date: September 5, 2013

TO: Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

Through: Keith Tucker, Reports Clearance Officer, HHS

Seleda Perryman, Report Clearance Officer, NIH

Vivian Horovitch-Kelley, PRA OMB Clearance Liaison, NCI

FROM: Irene Prabhu Das, Ph.D.

Outcomes Research Branch, Division of Cancer Control & Population Sciences

National Cancer Institute (NCI)/NIH

SUBJECT: New Submission of “Multidisciplinary Treatment Planning (MTP) within the

NCI Community Cancer Centers Program”

This is a request for OMB to approve the new information collection titled, “Multidisciplinary Treatment Planning within the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program” for one year. The supporting statements and various attachments accompany this memorandum.

The aim of this exploratory survey is to understand how community hospitals in the NCI Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP) hospitals organize and implement multidisciplinary treatment planning (MTP), a fundamental element of multidisciplinary care. Multidisciplinary care and treatment planning processes are promoted at hospitals; however, this approach to cancer care is not well understood.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) currently funds 21 hospitals through the NCCCP to deliver enhanced quality care and support clinical, basic, and population-based research. Ongoing efforts to enhance quality of care have focused generally on assessing the growth of multidisciplinary care. Data on multidisciplinary team organization and implementation to facilitate the development of such programs, however, are not currently available. The proposed web-based survey will gather organizational-level data on composition of provider teams, meeting process, and patient involvement. It will be administered over an 8-week period. All 21 hospitals will be requested to participate in the proposed survey. Information collected from NCCCP hospitals will add to the existing knowledge of multidisciplinary care and contribute to the building research in the area of coordinated cancer care. The estimated burden to all the NCCCP hospitals is 22 hours.

A mission of the Outcomes Research Branch within the NCI Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences is to coordinate research that assesses quality of cancer care at all levels of delivery, including the organization and system levels. Understanding the real-world context of organizing and implementing MTP within a network of hospitals is a significant contribution to informing future research in quality cancer care.