# A public tracker of how long each country takes to adopt new evidence

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-evidence-to-adoption-tracker/  
OnCo record `idea-data-evidence-to-adoption-tracker` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Measure and publish, for every practice-changing result, how long it takes before most eligible patients in each country and hospital actually receive it.

## Summary

The 17-year 'bench to bedside' figure is a slogan, not a measurement. Using structured treatment data and registry linkage, the time from publication to 50 percent uptake among eligible patients can be computed per country, region and centre for each practice change. The proposal funds a public dashboard of these diffusion metrics, updated quarterly, to make slow adoption visible and comparable.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Publishing diffusion times will reveal variation of years between countries and centres for the same evidence, and centres in the slowest quartile will improve after publication.
- Rationale: What is measured and published improves; cancer survival comparisons (EUROCARE, CONCORD) drove national cancer plans, and adoption speed is a more actionable metric.
- Proposed test: Compute diffusion curves for ten practice changes since 2015 across five countries with structured data; publish; track whether laggard centres accelerate over the next two years.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: data

## 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

- collections: [GLOBOCAN / Global Cancer Observatory](https://onco.cc/collections/globocan/), [SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results)](https://onco.cc/collections/seer/)
- fronts: [AI & Computation](https://onco.cc/fronts/ai-computation/)
- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Weak real-world evidence and registries](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-real-world-evidence/)
- 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/)

---
JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/idea-data-evidence-to-adoption-tracker.json