# A machine-readable treatment summary handed to every patient and readable by any hospital

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-acc-portable-treatment-summary/  
OnCo record `idea-acc-portable-treatment-summary` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Patients moving between hospitals often carry paper folders or nothing. A standard electronic summary of diagnosis, treatments, and doses that any system can read would stop repeated tests and dangerous gaps.

## Summary

Cancer care crosses institutions, regions, and countries, and treatment history is frequently lost or reconstructed from memory. A standard summary (diagnosis, stage, molecular results, regimens with cumulative doses, radiotherapy fields and doses, key toxicities, follow-up plan) in an interoperable format such as HL7 FHIR mCODE, generated automatically and held by the patient, would make continuity possible. The technical standards exist; the missing pieces are mandates and defaults.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Regions requiring a standard summary at each transition will reduce duplicated imaging and pathology by at least 20% and reduce cumulative-dose errors (for instance, anthracycline over-exposure) to near zero.
- Rationale: Discharge summaries and immunisation records show that standardised, patient-held documents reduce errors and duplication when they are the default output of the system rather than an extra task.
- Proposed test: Implementation in two health systems with measurement of duplicate tests, dose errors, and time to reconstruct history in receiving hospitals.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: data

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Fragmented care and guideline gaps): Hanna et al., Mortality due to cancer treatment delay: systematic review and meta-analysis (BMJ 2020): https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4087

## Connected records

- fronts: [AI & Computation](https://onco.cc/fronts/ai-computation/)
- bottlenecks: [Data silos](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-data-silos/), [Fragmented care and guideline gaps](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-care-fragmentation/), [Survivorship and late effects are neglected](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-survivorship/)
- key papers: [Mortality due to cancer treatment delay: systematic review and meta-analysis](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-hanna-bmj/)
- ideas: [A survivorship passport app for adolescent and young adult survivors](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-acc-aya-survivorship-passport/), [Survivorship care plans generated automatically from the treatment record](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-acc-auto-generated-survivorship-plans/)

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