ideasIdea
A public API serving the current standard of care for any cancer, stage and biomarker
A free web service where any app or hospital system can ask 'what is the recommended treatment for this exact situation today' and get a cited, versioned answer.
Developers of patient apps, trial-matching tools and decision support each hand-encode standards of care and let them rot. A public API over the computable guidelines and evidence graph, returning current recommendations with evidence grades, citations and version identifiers for a structured query (cancer, stage, biomarkers, line), would make currency a solved problem for the ecosystem, in the way that drug-interaction databases became shared infrastructure.
Hypothesis
Within three years, the majority of new oncology software products will consume the API rather than hand-encode standards, and the currency of recommendations in those products will match the guidelines within days.
Rationale
Shared infrastructure APIs (maps, payments, drug databases) are consumed universally once reliable; oncology standards of care are a natural candidate and have never been offered this way.
What would test it
Publish the API for two diseases; count integrations and measure the recommendation currency of consuming products versus non-consuming products after one year.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Knowledge reaches practice too slowly · Knowledge diffusion is slow: it takes years for a proven result to change what most patients receive, and no one can keep up with the literature.
- AI that is built but not validated or deployed · Thousands of cancer AI models are published; a handful are in clinical use, and fewer have shown they help patients.