# Credentialed diaspora oncologists staffing remote tumour boards for home-country hospitals

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-acc-diaspora-tele-tumour-boards/  
OnCo record `idea-acc-diaspora-tele-tumour-boards` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Thousands of oncologists trained in poorer countries now work abroad. A structured programme could let them join weekly video case conferences for hospitals back home, improving decisions at almost no cost.

## Summary

Ad hoc tele-tumour boards between high-income and LMIC centres exist but are fragile and unmeasured. A formal programme would credential diaspora and partner specialists, schedule weekly boards by tumour type, use a standard case template, record recommendations, and audit whether they were implemented and whether outcomes changed. The cost is coordination, not salaries.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Hospitals with a weekly structured remote tumour board will change management in at least 25% of presented cases and increase guideline-concordant treatment by at least 20 percentage points over one year.
- Rationale: Multidisciplinary review changes management in a substantial minority of cases in every setting studied; the marginal value is highest where local specialist input is scarcest.
- Proposed test: Twelve hospitals, six with boards and six waitlisted, comparing concordance, time to treatment decision, and clinician-reported confidence.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: clinic

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Most of the world has almost no cancer care): WHO fact sheet, Cancer: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer

## Connected records

- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Most of the world has almost no cancer care](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-global-access/), [Not enough oncologists, nurses, pathologists, physicists](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-workforce/)

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