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Hacker News
6/10

Trial Report Card

A patient-facing app that pulls together published clinical trial outcomes — success rates, side effects, withdrawals, long-term follow-ups — and translates them into a plain-English 'report card' for any drug or therapy you're considering.

Target user

patients with chronic or serious conditions weighing treatment options with their doctor

Features
  • Plain-English summary of every FDA-approved drug and major therapy for your condition, with a 1-10 'track record' score
  • Ten-year outcome view showing how many trials succeeded, failed, were withdrawn, or had safety issues surface post-approval
  • Side-effect frequency chart compared against alternative therapies and placebo rates
  • Auto-generated list of questions to bring to your next doctor visit, grounded in the trial data
Why now

A wave of late-stage trial failures (Alzheimer's, certain oncology drugs) has eroded public trust, and patients increasingly want evidence before agreeing to high-cost or experimental treatments; the HN discussion showed 82 points and 45 comments, signalling strong reader appetite.

Signals · overall 6/10
Demand
6/10

Regulators and pharma already require plain-language summaries; Sood et al. cited at 91% of patients want trial findings — but evidence is for trial participants, not general consumers shopping treatments, and no dominant consumer app exists yet.Lay Summaries & Plain-Language Results: Patient-Friendly Communication That Survives Regulatory ScrutinySharing trial results

Whitespace
5/10

Drugs.com offers side-by-side drug comparison with patient reviews but does not synthesize published clinical trial outcomes into a trial-derived 'report card'; the closest direct-to-patient player (Iodine) was absorbed into GoodRx, suggesting the standalone niche is contested but not dominated.Drug Comparison Tool - Drugs.comIodine Comparison - Drugs.com

Monetization
4/10

Patient willingness to pay for drug info is weak — Iodine, the most-aligned prior product, was acquired by GoodRx rather than scaling independently; consumer drug-info ads/Affiliate (GoodRx playbook) or B2B payer deals are the realistic paths, not direct subscriptions.Drug Comparison Tool - Drugs.comHome | ClinicalTrials.gov

Longevity
7/10

EU/EMA lay-summary mandates and broader transparency trend give regulatory tailwinds, but LLM commoditization means trial-summarization is increasingly a feature inside incumbents (Drugs.com, WebMD, GoodRx, UpToDate) rather than a standalone product.Lay Summaries & Plain-Language Results: Patient-Friendly Communication That Survives Regulatory ScrutinyEvidence-based Clinical Solutions for Healthcare | UpToDate | Wolters Kluwer

Feasibility
6/10

Core data (ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed, FDA labels) is free and LLM summarization is technically trivial, but the hard parts — weighting heterogeneous endpoints, handling conflicting trials, and avoiding medical-liability exposure when patients act on summaries — are non-trivial.Home | ClinicalTrials.govParticipant Experience Toolkit - Plain Language Result Summaries

Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes · 82 points · 45 commentsHacker News · 2026-07-26 (today)