Multidisciplinary Team Management of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Is Standard of Care

MDTs in general are becoming more common in medical practice. The need for MDTs varies depending on disease complexity, and nowhere is an MDT more useful than in the management of HCC. Although robust data supporting the use of liver cancer MDTs is weak for management of patients with HCC, nearly all centers that provide comprehensive HCC care use a liver cancer MDT, and we argue here that its use should be considered standard of care for patients with HCC. Several challenges face the evolving liver cancer MDT, including frequent lack of institutional support, shortages of expert personnel, and difficulties documenting outcomes toward conducting clinical research on patients managed through the MDT. Some of these challenges can be met with use of bioinformatics tools now being built or tested and will certainly be in widespread use in the near future.