# A public API serving the current standard of care for any cancer, stage and biomarker

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

## TL;DR

A free web service where any app or hospital system can ask 'what is the recommended treatment for this exact situation today' and get a cited, versioned answer.

## Summary

Developers of patient apps, trial-matching tools and decision support each hand-encode standards of care and let them rot. A public API over the computable guidelines and evidence graph, returning current recommendations with evidence grades, citations and version identifiers for a structured query (cancer, stage, biomarkers, line), would make currency a solved problem for the ecosystem, in the way that drug-interaction databases became shared infrastructure.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Within three years, the majority of new oncology software products will consume the API rather than hand-encode standards, and the currency of recommendations in those products will match the guidelines within days.
- Rationale: Shared infrastructure APIs (maps, payments, drug databases) are consumed universally once reliable; oncology standards of care are a natural candidate and have never been offered this way.
- Proposed test: Publish the API for two diseases; count integrations and measure the recommendation currency of consuming products versus non-consuming products after one year.
- 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: [An open knowledge graph linking trials, results, biomarkers, drugs and recommendations](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-open-evidence-knowledge-graph/), [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/)
- technologies: [AI trial matching & clinical decision support](https://onco.cc/technologies/ai-trial-matching/)
- bottlenecks: [AI that is built but not validated or deployed](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-ai-validation/), [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/)
- 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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