What challenges do we face and need to overcome for a program for personalized cancer screening?
In the long run, for us to gain trust in our program and company is one of the most important factors. After all, why should anyone listen to recommendations given by someone they don't know from the beginning?
We want to achieve this with a high quality of service, digitalized yet still very individualized service, building company reputation and being pragmatic with the program.
Here are some key challenges which we address to achieve our goal:
- Network of Medical Doctors: To cover all the cancer types from breast, lung to colon etc. we need to closely include several specialities of Medical Doctors like oncologists, gynaecologist, urologists, internists and dermatologists into our program. Luckily, due to our work with cancer patients for Second Opinions and Follow-Up Monitoring we have a good starting point as we already have cooperation with several Medical Doctors for this. However, we must continuously expand our network and seek new specialists willing to collaborate.
- Continuous Improvement of Cancer Risk Algorithms: As almost on a monthly base new studies and new findings around cancer can improve the accuracy of our program, we want to integrate new relevant knowledge with a 6-month review-cycle and provide our patients the highest quality of personalization in terms cancer risk and screening recommendations.
- Involvement in Research: We want to actively involve ourselves in studies related to risk evaluation (risk stratification), cancer prevention and early-detection. But not only that, also how to improve patient involvement, enhance accessibility, ease of planning, and execution of screenings.
- Addressing complexity of patient's medical characteristics with pure individualization: Considering all the risk factors a patient may encounter during their lifetime such as a personal history of disease, a chronical disease or even pre-cancerous disease as well as a family history of cancer can make an individualized screening plan a challenge. Especially to confirm our algorithms at the beginning, wherever a patient has personal conditions or a family history, the screening plan will be reviewed by a Medical Doctor.
- Effectiveness of individualized cancer screening: In short, it is only effective if patients go to the recommended, personalized screenings. Only having a plan for it, doesn't make it effective. We want to set a novel and bring clarity with our program, extended with recommendations where to go to for screenings and directly making appointments. Furthermore, we closely monitor if patients go to screenings as well as remind them.
- Psychological burden in case of high-risk classification: The main purpose of individualization of screenings is to identify patients with a higher risk (or lower risk) for several cancer types. But if a patient receives a high-risk classification for e.g. breast cancer, we can't leave those patients just live with this information. We need to actively engage with them either through a direct conversation with a Medical Doctor or offer further information on how to handle a high-risk classification and what it means for a personal lifestyle.
These are just some of our key challenges we need to solve. For all of them, we have a solid concept in place, but it needs to prove itself in practice.
If you have comments what you think about this, want to add challenges or concerns you would have as a patient, it would be highly appreciated!
Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we'll give you a glimpse of our concept and first insights into the platform.
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