# Report time toxicity, the days a treatment consumes, in every trial and decision aid

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

## TL;DR

Alongside how many months a treatment adds, patients should be told how many days it takes from them in clinics, infusions, scans and recovery.

## Summary

Time toxicity (days with in-person healthcare contact) has been proposed as a formal endpoint and, when reanalysed from trials of drugs offering weeks of benefit, can consume much of the survival gain. The proposal is that trials report days at home versus days in contact with healthcare for each arm, that regulators and guideline bodies display it, and that decision aids present it alongside survival and side-effects.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: When time toxicity is presented, a meaningful share of patients with marginal-benefit palliative treatments choose differently, and sponsors design regimens with fewer visits.
- Rationale: Patients weigh time differently from clinicians; the metric is computable from trial case report forms already collected.
- Proposed test: Reanalyse ten recent pivotal trials to report time toxicity; then randomise presentation of the metric in a decision-aid study and measure choice and regret.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: research

## 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

- terms: [Overall survival (OS)](https://onco.cc/terms/os/), [Progression-free survival (PFS)](https://onco.cc/terms/pfs/)
- bottlenecks: [Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-patient-voice/), [Toxicity and quality of life are undervalued](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-toxicity-qol/)

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