INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
CancerAid, a self-reporting and symptom monitoring tool for cancer patients, has scored its first major coup in the U.S
healthcare market with its integration into Epic Systems electronic health records at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles and an integration with
Apple HealthKit.
Cedars, an investor in the company through an accelerator program it ran in conjunction with Techstars, marks the first U.S
hospital system to incorporate CancerAid self-reporting information into a dashboard system for doctors.
It been a long road for company
co-foundersRaghav Murali-Ganesh and Nikhil Pooviah, who first met eight years ago at the Chris O&Brien Lifehouse,a Sydney, Australia cancer
treatment center.
Pooviah was a resident working with Murali-Ganesh in radiation oncology, positions the two men occupied for several years
before venturing off on their own to launch the service that would become CancerAid.
The company initial inspiration came from years spent
checking out the tools that were already in the market for cancer patients — tools like Chemo Calendar that helped with things like
scheduling and monitoring appointments.
Instead of studying for some particularly tricky upcoming exams, Pooviah was spending time
developing a patient-facing self-reporting symptom tracker and a community portal for cancer patients to discuss, share and monitor their
own symptoms.
CancerAid co-founders Drs
Nikhil Pooviah and Raghav Murali-Ganesh and Martin Seneviratne
It was that first tool that won the company acceptance into the Cedars Sinai
accelerator and a competitive position in TechCrunch inaugural Startup Battlefield competition in Sydney, Australia.
From its initial
development, CancerAid now has four primary functions
On the patient side, there personalized cancer information for patients after their initial diagnosis
The company also provides a personal journal and symptom journal for patients to report on how they&re feeling, both emotionally and
physically, as they progress through their treatment.
A feature the company calls &Champions& was added so that family and friends could
keep up with patients and encourage them
And finally, the company added a social networking feature so patients could connect with a broader community of patients and
survivors.
Now, the company has added &ClinicianLink,& a clinician-facing dashboard that sits in Epic and integrates with the existing
workflows of nurses, oncologists, radiologists and the rest of the hospital administration and operational staff that touches patients as
they undergo treatment.
The company expects to lock in six-figure licensing deals for hospital systems to access the entire toolkit and
offer it to patients.
For hospitals, there some research that suggests simply by reporting their symptoms patients can improve their own
outcomes, because doctors have a better sense on more regular intervals of the potential problems their patients face, the company
said.
&Patients will be able to use the patient-facing app at home, with a feedback loop back to their care team (physicians, nurses) in the
hospital in real-time,& wrote Pooviah in an email
&This feedback loop helps reduce [emergency room] visits and 30 day readmissions (saving $19,000 per patient per year).&
Beyond the Epic
integration, CancerAid is also integrating with HealthKit — so that Apple wearables will be able to have the CancerAid functionality, the
company said.
The company has 20,000 patients on the app already, and is being used in 80 of the 200 largest U.S
health systems, according to Pooviah.
Backed by $1.9 million in funding from strategic and financial investors, including Cedars-Sinai
Health System, Techstars, Australia Shark Tank, Slingshot Ventures and Artesian Capital, the company is looking to expand in the U.S
through a dedicated subsidiary as it concentrates on one of the world largest healthcare markets.
