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

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-moon-results-in-plain-words/  
OnCo record `idea-moon-results-in-plain-words` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

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.

## Summary

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.

## Fields

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

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency): Basch et al., Overall survival results of a trial assessing patient-reported outcomes for symptom monitoring during routine cancer treatment (JAMA 2017): https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2017.7156

## Connected records

- technologies: [Comprehensive genomic profiling](https://onco.cc/technologies/cgp/), [Histopathology & immunohistochemistry](https://onco.cc/technologies/histopathology-ihc/)
- terms: [Next-generation sequencing (NGS)](https://onco.cc/terms/ngs/), [Variant of uncertain significance (VUS)](https://onco.cc/terms/vus/)
- 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/)

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