Addressing unmet patient needs

Often, patients dealing with the hopelessness and fear of a deadly disease don’t realise what they need to get better. Life becomes about surviving from pill to pill — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Our commitment to the patients extend beyond the pill – we want to help them lead holistically healthy lives. This requires focus on positive outcomes. With this in mind, we’ve created a pilot cancer companion app, which sets up a comprehensive care ecosystem for each patient once they are diagnosed. An innovative digital platform, it brings hospitals, healthcare providers, care teams and caregivers together, and helps cancer patients to connect easily and quickly with doctors.

The brainchild of Rajdeep Ghosh, who leads our Digital Centre of Excellence, and his team, this app was born out of a need for patient-centric innovation. “The intent was to provide solutions for the unmet needs of cancer patients beyond the pill,” he says. “The app educates patients and caregivers about cancer and guides them through the treatment plan, thus empowering them.” And innovation comes with great responsibility. “As designers, we are motivated to craft solutions that resonate with users,” says Pooja Vasu, Research Lead. “Working on this project made us even more aware of the patient journey.”

It is this journey that is at the heart of this platform – one we take with patients as they progress from diagnosis to treatment and remission. Once onboarded, the app not only provides quick access to the care team, but also helps patients understand what they are going through via features such as mood logging and tracking of side effects. It sends out medication reminders and acts as a document repository for treatment records. There’s educational material as well, which provide a range of information including foods that quicken recovery, recipes and even makeup tips to mitigate the effects of chemotherapy.

“Cancer care requires end-to-end management of the disease, which includes monitoring lifestyle, mental health and nutrition,” says Anupama Rao Singh, Country Head, LATAM. “For this, the power of digital platforms can be leveraged to make the lives of cancer patients easier.”

For Rajdeep, this platform is a step towards transforming ourselves into holistic healthcare enablers for patients. Our vision of Good Health Can’t Wait has taken a multidimensional approach — one that consistently enables us to reimagine patient care.