ideasIdea
Subscribable alerts when the standard of care changes for a patient's situation
Doctors and patients could subscribe to a specific cancer, stage and biomarker and be told, with sources, the moment the recommended treatment changes for that situation.
Practice changes reach clinicians and patients through conferences, news and word of mouth. With computable guidelines and structured trial results, a change in recommendation for a defined population (for example, HER2-low metastatic breast cancer, second line) can be detected and pushed as a structured alert with the evidence and plain-language summary, to clinicians via the EHR and to patients via apps, with a flag for patients who may be affected.
Hypothesis
Situation-specific alerts will shorten the time between a practice-changing result and its application to eligible patients, especially in community settings.
Rationale
Personalised, timely, actionable messages outperform broadcast dissemination in behaviour change research; oncology has never had the structured backbone to send them.
What would test it
Offer alerts to clinicians in a network for one year covering ten practice changes; compare uptake in their eligible patients with non-subscribers via structured data.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
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.
- Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency · Most patients cannot understand their options, find trials, or push back, so decisions are made for them.