Episode 010: How Tracking Your Symptoms Can Help You Live Longer
Apr 17, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
If there one thing that I regret throughout my cancer adventure, it's not being properly prepared. There’s a lot going on and it’s easy to forget about your symptoms. You forget to tell your specialist what’s bothering, so to help you with that, in this episode you’re going to find out about Cancer Aid, a mobile application that helps you track your symptoms and so much more. I'm talking to Raghav Ganesh-Murali, COO of CancerAid and in this episode, we cover:
The importance of logging and sharing your symptoms
Being empowered and making better decisions
Having the support of your champions through treatment
Trends and symptom changes that integrate into patient's medical record
Online platform to share and connect via stories
Links
CancerAid
CancerAid Wins $500,000 on Shark Tank (YouTube)
Simplify Cancer First Visit Oncologist Checklist
Full Transcript
Joe: Raghav, how did Cancer Aid come about? What problem were you guys trying to solve?
Raghav: Yes, so CancerAid is basically a solution to a problem that we save whilst working in clinical practice. My background is as a radiation oncology specialist. I trained here in Sydney. Basically, when we saw patients, we often were able to see the same problems time and time again for each of these patients. We did a survey of a few patients at the hospital we work at. We work in Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. We saw four main problems. To start with cancer patients and some of their diagnosis, they were looking for the right information. During treatment, they wanted tools to help them manage their illness.
They wanted to be able to connect with other people, their family, their friends and share with them their experiences, so they didn’t have to repeat themselves. Lastly, they wanted to connect with other patients that have gone through similar experiences and reduce the isolation that was perceived. We took those problems onboard and came up with a solution to try and address some of those problems. It took about a year to design it and Cancer Aid was released in August 2016. To answer the four problems, we provide patients with the right information, peer-reviewed, medically reliable information.
The second part, we give patients a personal journal and a symptom journal, so they can record their experiences and log their symptoms. The logging of the symptoms was especially important because patients were better engaged for health with better outcomes. Very recently, there has been some strong randomized evidence that has suggested that patients who logged symptoms share that with their clinicians, actually can potentially live longer, which is very exciting.
The third solution, which was connecting family and friends, we’ve got a component inside the app called the Champion’s Feature, so a patient who we call the hero going through their treatment can nominate a friend or family, a caregiver through the app and they get a deep link. They click on the deep link and they’re able to access the hero, which is a patient’s profile and can read what the journals they are logging are.
That helps with motivating a patient who’s going through a tough time, so they can log their journal and then they can share with the people that they choose to read with them. Lastly, the community, we’ve got a static community, not a dynamic community, which means patients can read about stories from other patients that have gone through similar experiences. Eventually, this will become a more dynamic community, where they can track other patients, but right now, it’s simply reading stories. There are a couple of reasons we haven’t done that yet, but it’s in our pipeline, we’ll get to it over 2018.
Joe: That’s fantastic that it works on so many levels. It benefits the patients, it benefits the doctors, it also benefits the community people who want to help out.
