Cancer, Trauma & Nutrition
As Integrative Care
Partners: Integrative care practitioners | 2023 | Cancer, Integrative Care, Holistic Healing, Emotions, Health & Nutrition
Project Summary
PARTNER
Integrative care practitioners like Dr. Nasha Winters & Adam Greer
THE CHALLENGE
Cancer, a global leading cause of death, impacts holistic well-being. Conventional treatment's severe side effects often lead to treatment discontinuation. Integrative care mitigates side effects, supports treatment adherence, promoting faster recovery.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
TOP 3 INSIGHTS
1. There is limited time and access to resources. Nutrition is expensive and doctors don’t always have a lot of time and are indifferent towards discussing other care options. This results in irrevocably late advice and also self-advocacy by patients.
2. There’s a dangerous amount of information available at a click on Dr Google and yet there's a lack of streamlined information for the patients and their nutrition.
3. The emotional trauma while approaching nutritional care is massive and due to the severe side effects that come with the treatment cause a disconnection in their relationship with food.
THEME
Empowering Patient-Centric Innovation: Navigating Complexity to Design Solutions within Healthcare Systems.
SERVICE PROPOSITION
Introducing Dear Diet, a nutrition Hand holder for Colorectal Cancer patients. It is a nutritional data-driven platform that gives streamlined information and personalised recommendations, allowing emotional and experiential mapping associated with food.
FOCUS
Integrative cancer care for holistic healing of cancer patients
IMPACT
Dear Diet hugely impacts the following stakeholders:
1. Cancer Patients: provides affordable nutrition advice minimising the overwhelming anxiety and severe side effects throughout the treatment. It gives back their lost control, through symptom and pattern tracking helping them understand their individual nutrition needs.
2. Doctors, Nutritionists and Integrative Cancer Carers: help them dedicate more time to specific cases, enhance audience connection, and facilitate integrative care advocacy, fostering a healthy doctor-patient relationship so doctors can focus on treating cancer.
3. Medical Institutions & Research Centres: the collected data has the potential to aid future research and correlate food choices with clinical outcomes for all cancer types not just individually but also culturally. Medical professionals can access this data as electronic health records, which can be translated into reports using AI, facilitating a deeper understanding of each case's specificity.
My Responsibilities
END-TO-END: 1. Conducting user research and ecosystem analysis. User Research: Quantitative & Qualitative, insight framing, user interviews, ethical conduct frameworks. 2. Mapping patient journey to understand pain points and user needs, creating persona maps based on behaviours. 3. Collaboration and co creations with patients/survivors & healthcare professionals to ideate and conceptualiuse solutions. 4. Systems & strategic thinking 5. Designing service touchpoints 6. Visual design & communication 7. Stakeholder management
1. Overview & Introduction
18.1 million
Holistic healing is important for cancer patients because it takes into account the whole person, including their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. This approach recognizes that cancer affects not just the body, but also the mind and spirit, and that these aspects of a person's life are interconnected and can affect one another.
MENTAL
Whole Person
EMOTIONAL
PHYSICAL
SPIRITUAL
Did you know that 18.1 million people each year wake up to an unfortunate news of their Cancer diagnosis causing their lives to change upside down. They wake up juggling and struggling not just with the feelings of fear but also with guilt and anger on how they have disappointed their bodies and vice versa.
Context - Cancer Care Approaches
Landscape - Cancer Care
What is under Integrative Care landscape?
1. Nutrition
2. Physical
3. Psychological
4. Others - Palliative
2. Ecosystem Analysis
RESEARCH
Primary & Secondary
We engaged with patients, survivors, and subject matter experts to uncover their challenges. We are grateful to our panel of 12 experts, 9 survivors, and tutors for their valuable contributions, time, expertise, lived experiences and support throughout our journey.
Our method of research involved interview calls online, visiting healthcare centres and in-person meet ups.
Narrow Scope/Opportunity:
Food & Nutrition
We looked at the landscape again to understand what’s the most valuable. We chose to go ahead with Food & Nutrition covering different aspects like diets, supplements, herbs and mindful eating.
But why food and nutrition?
-
It came up often in our initial research with SMEs and survivors
-
It is a basic need and fuel for your body
-
And a balanced nutritious diet boosts immunity, heals mind, body & soul to recover from the side effects of treatment
Understanding the users
After speaking to various individuals, we identified different personas and their attitudes towards integrative care:
1. The Dismissers
2. The Unaware
3. The Believers
4. The Blind Believers
We focused on Alice's persona type i.e., 'The Believer'
3. Findings & Key Problems
The following findings from our research helped us form 3 major key insights
1
Limited time and access to resources
1. Nutrition is expensive 2. Doctors are irritated with frequent visits 3. There is indifferent behavious towards patients if they discuss other care options. 4. Sometimes nutritional advice is given when it's too late and patients are visibly malnourished
2
Lack of streamlined information
1. Miscommunication from doctors on nutrition can lead to cancer patients consuming foods feeding cancer 2. Doctors make suggestions in extremes because of lack of belief and evidence 3. Doctors don’t want to move away from their conventional learnings
3
Associated emotional trauma
1. Many experience a heavy loss of control because their bodies have let them down 2. Disconnection with food because of severe side effects like changing taste buds 3. Isolation because of different meal preparation 4. Overwhelmed with the process which makes decision making difficult
Each type of cancer requires different dietary assistance. Therefore, to begin with, we decided to focus on colorectal cancer , which has the highest dietary assistance needs compared to others and is the third most common type.
4. Impact theory
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Cancer patients who are not provided with adequate information and resources to support their nutritional needs may struggle to maintain a healthy diet during treatment, which can lead to physical ill-being and emotional trauma.
HYPOTHESIS
If we provide a comprehensive journey with nutritional support and emotional care to cancer patients it will improve their nutritional status, reduce treatment-related side effects, and enhance their overall quality of life.
IMPACT
We believe that this will help reduce associated emotional trauma in the journey of the cancer patients by helping them regain the sense of control that gets lost, reconnect with food and have access to streamlined information at any time of the day.
Strategy Framework
We brainstormed several concepts, including meal delivery, cancer-specific cafe spaces, awareness campaigns, community formation, and personalized nutritional advice. We opted for an iterative SCAMPER process which allowed us to refine our solution based on individual calls, ensuring collaborative development.
S
Substitute
C
Combine
A
Adapt
M
Modify
P
Put to another use
E
Eliminate
R
Rearrange
5. Final Idea/Service - Delivery
Dear Diet
Dear Diet is a nutritional platform that gives streamlined information and personalized recommendations, allowing emotional and experiential mapping associated with food.
This will help create awareness at an early diagnosis stage by encouraging healthy and sustainable eating habits for patients. In addition, it will help them recognise their personal nutrition patterns helping them re-establish their relationship with food.
FEATURES / PROTOTYPES
JOURNEY PLAN (Physical/digital)
3
Sign Up/
Login
1
2
3 layered
assessment
- general
- symptoms
- emotions
Unlock
journey
plan
(digital)
5
Daily nutritional advice based on what the user is experiencing. For example receiving a list of different foods with their nutritional values that would help reduce feeling of a particular symptom. Using the same list of ingredients, you can view see various combinations of recipe suggestions.
Symptom based advice
4
Log button allows you to record symptoms and emotions that are associated with certain foods. The recorded data helps identify how each meal in the day would make you feel plotting food triggers and soothers.
Log symptoms & emotions
Our key partners include renowned medical experts such as Dr. Nash Winter, Jess Higgins, and Adam Greer. Additionally, we will leverage existing services like Hello Fresh and Meal IQ to offer healthy recipe combinations. We also aim to attract potential investors and explore opportunities to partner with established market players like Boots, Hello Fresh, and Hello Jasper.
Our discussions with healthcare leaders at Boots, one of the leading British health and beauty retailer and pharmacy chain are already underway.
6. Future Business Impact
Our socially conscious business follows a monthly subscription model that offers all features except the personalized journey plan, whic can be purchased separately. We strive to provide affordable services compared to other high-priced nutrition services.
This service is globally scalable catering to all cancer types. Our strategy is to have the colorectal patients in the UK become our early adopters. By gaining a strong foothold in this market segment and proving the viability and usefulness of our offering we then plan to expand horizontally in other english speaking coutries like the States.
Alongside we will expand vertically to upper gastrointestinal cancers with similar dietary needs, eventually covering all cancer types aligning with our overarching vision of providing holistic well-being for all cancer patients worldwide.
Usability testing - Client Feedback
Feedback
1st Speaker
SAM HILL,
CANCER SURVIVOR
2nd Speaker
DR. ADAM GREER,
NUTRITIONAL THERAPY PRACTITIONER & NUTRITIONIST
3rd Speaker
ERIC MACHADO
HEAD OF HEALTHCARE STRATEGY, BOOTS