{"entity":{"id":"idea-moon-results-in-plain-words","kind":"idea","name":"Every pathology and genomic report ships with a signed plain-language version","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"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)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2017.7156"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["cgp","histopathology-ihc"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["vus","ngs"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-patient-voice","b-knowledge-diffusion"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","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","cost":"small","horizonYears":2},"route":"/ideas/idea-moon-results-in-plain-words/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"cgp","kind":"technology","name":"Comprehensive genomic profiling","route":"/technologies/cgp/"},{"id":"histopathology-ihc","kind":"technology","name":"Histopathology & immunohistochemistry","route":"/technologies/histopathology-ihc/"}],"term":[{"id":"ngs","kind":"term","name":"Next-generation sequencing (NGS)","route":"/terms/ngs/"},{"id":"vus","kind":"term","name":"Variant of uncertain significance (VUS)","route":"/terms/vus/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-knowledge-diffusion","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Knowledge reaches practice too slowly","route":"/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/"},{"id":"b-patient-voice","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency","route":"/bottlenecks/b-patient-voice/"}]}}