OnCo
ideasIdea

Every pathology and genomic report ships with a signed plain-language version

When your biopsy or gene test comes back, you get a version written for you, drafted by software and checked and signed by your clinician, alongside the technical report.

Patients now receive laboratory results in portals before their clinician has spoken to them, often in dense pathology language. The proposal is that laboratories and hospitals generate a plain-language companion for every diagnostic report (what was tested, what was found, what it usually means, what happens next) using a language model constrained to templates and the actual report text, released only after clinician sign-off. Templates should be co-written with patient groups and cover the twenty most common report types first.

Hypothesis
Plain companions reduce patient anxiety and misinterpretation after portal release and cut clarifying calls and messages by a third, without introducing clinically significant errors after sign-off.
Rationale
Pathology and molecular reports follow structured formats amenable to templated translation; clinician sign-off keeps accountability where it belongs, and the workload is small relative to the messages the reports currently generate.
What would test it
Pilot in two centres across pathology and next-generation sequencing reports: measure error rate on blinded expert review, patient comprehension, anxiety scores and message volume against matched controls.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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