Publication

Conversations around multicancer early detection (MCED) technologies tend to center on their perceived ability to screen for early signals of cancer, when treatments are more likely to lead to better outcomes. However, while there are likely benefits to screening and diagnostic programs, MCED can also introduce patient harms with potential false-positive results. Additionally, many stakeholders recall past clinical innovations with troubled introductions that led to public confusion. Stakeholders fear that if MCED technologies are not properly evaluated for their clinical applicability—and clinicians and health systems do not proactively prepare for their implementation—the public will lose confidence in the technologies before they are optimized.

With these challenges in mind, a group of leading public and private healthcare stakeholders recommended forming a consortium to evaluate the clinical and public health value of MCED. Subsequently, a voluntary group of steering committee members and advisers representing a range of perspectives across the healthcare sector—including primary-care, population-health, and oncology clinicians and academics; payers, not-for-profit/patient-advocacy organizations, and industry representatives—initiated work to design this consortium. The MCED Consortium aimed to establish standards and implementation guidance for using MCED technologies in clinical care and seek to understand and address the impact of these technologies, especially on health equity.

This Summary of Themes synthesizes the MCED Consortium design effort and the creation of the MCED Consortium Blueprint, a consensus document that lays out the mission, scope, objectives, governance, work plans, and operating model for the group. The blueprint laid the foundation for a public-private collaborative that was later formalized as a not-for-profit organization.