# Subscribable alerts when the standard of care changes for a patient's situation

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-standard-of-care-change-alerts/  
OnCo record `idea-data-standard-of-care-change-alerts` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

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.

## Summary

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.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- 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.
- Proposed test: 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
- Actor: engineering

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Knowledge reaches practice too slowly): Morris, Wooding & Grant, The answer is 17 years, what is the question (JRSM 2011): https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2011.110180

## Connected records

- ideas: [A plain-language summary of every cancer trial result within a year](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-plain-language-summary-mandate/), [Living guidelines published as versioned, computable rules](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-computable-living-guidelines/)
- fronts: [AI & Computation](https://onco.cc/fronts/ai-computation/)
- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-patient-voice/)
- key papers: [The answer is 17 years, what is the question: understanding time lags in translational research](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-morris-j-r-soc-med/)

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