Hello, my name is Julia Röper. I'm working at the Pius Hospital at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. And thank you for the opportunity to show you some first results from our study Athera. We investigated the adherence to treatment recommendation for multidisciplinary tumor boards. And these are my disclosures. And now a little bit about the background to our study. Lung cancer centers are responsible for coordinating the care of lung cancer patients in a special region in Germany. And they also diagnose and treat them according to the latest evidence-based knowledge. For this purpose, every patient in Germany should be discussed in a multidisciplinary tumor board. And the tumor board, they are given an individual treatment plan and they discuss and the treatment recommendations are given. Therefore, we investigated how the recommendations from the tumor boards being adhered. And two, which factors determine the adherence to tumor board recommendations. And which is the relationship between the adherence of tumor board recommendation and the patient's outcomes in terms of overall survival. In our study, we show you data from 1,784 newly diagnosed patients, all with lung cancer, of course. And they all were discussed in the tumor board in our certified lung cancer center in northern Germany, the Pierce Hospital. And they were diagnosed between 2014 and 2018. We documented all the patient clinical data and we evaluated them according to the adherence of tumor board recommendations. And in this presentation, I will show you the primary analyzers of the first 161 cases. And figure one shows you the study design in detail. And now here is figure one study design in detail. At first, we collect all the tumor board recommendations. And then we had a look of the adherence and we defined adherence in three groups. Completely adherence, partial, and missing. Then the next step, we collect all the important patient's characteristics like age, sex, ECOG status, et cetera. Then we collect reasons for non-adherence. And also, we collect the supply organizations where the patients were treated. All patients were firstly diagnosed in our Pierce Hospital, but just 50% of them were treated after first diagnosis at our Pierce Hospital, 25% were treated at the Oncologische Tagesklinik in Oldenburg, Germany, and the other 25% were treated in external medical practice, also in the northern of Germany. And all these data were correlated to the outcome of the overall survival of the patients. And now I would like to show you some first results. Our patients were in the median age 67 years old and mostly male. Most of the patients had an ECOG status of 0 or 1, and 79% of them were current or ex-heavy smokers. And in 78 patients, the treatment recommendations from the Multiplicinary Tumor Board were completely adherent and different reasons for non-adherence could be defined. For example, patient's wish, patient's characteristic, and death before or during the therapy were reasons for non-adherence. Here I would like to show you some first survivor curves. In the first curve, you see patients with complete adherence versus partial adherence. Patients with complete adherence had a 50-month survival, and patients with partial adherence just 5 months. These curves are almost significant, but in figure 3, you can see the completely adherence versus non-adherence, and patients with non-adherence had just one month of overall survival, and these curves are highly significant. And now I'm already at the end of the presentation, and our take-home message or conclusion is that these primary results give a hint that the fact of the patients with an adherent treatment after first diagnosis had a longer OS than patients with another treatment. And these findings can be used to design intervention that improved the adherence of multidisciplinary tumor board recommendations, and we can also optimize the quality of care in the oncology care for the patients. And in the future, we will be analyzing more cases, of course, and then we included also the patients' characteristics and the healthcare organizations, and these variables were correlated with the overall survival of the patients, that we can get a better view to see which variables are important for the adherence of treatment recommendations of the multidisciplinary tumor board. Thank you for your attention, of course, and have a great conference, and I hope next year we will all together in person in Austria, and bye!

treatment recommendations

multidisciplinary tumor boards

lung cancer patients

adherence

overall survival