Case

Better mental health support in cancer

War On Cancer is a social network and app for everyone affected by cancer. It is a forum for people who have been given a cancer diagnosis, where next-of-kin to those affected can also get support. How can identification of preventive treatment be improved using AI and predictive analysis? Together with Knowit, War on Cancer is working to develop even better mental health support.

Many people are impacted by cancer

Many people are impacted by cancer – directly or through someone near to them. The fight against cancer affects both physical and mental health, commonly leading to feelings of social isolation, loss of identity, clinical depression, and even PTSD. These feelings and conditions are often undiscovered and undiagnosed by healthcare. This is not because physicians and healthcare staff do not care, but because they do not always have the right tools or the time and resources to take note of and diagnose them.

More than 65,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in Sweden each year. Many more are impacted by the disease. We asked ourselves if we could help these people get better support and at the same time provide assistance to healthcare.

Gathering insights for improved support

Knowit and War On Cancer jointly performed a survey to gather experiences from cancer patients, in order to better understand their views on how healthcare manages their mental health. Responses were collected from members worldwide through the War On Cancer app.

Once these insights were gathered, our analytics team could perform a qualitative analysis using SAS Visual Analytics, to gain a deeper understanding of the patient journey. Natural Language Processing was used for translation and for extracting the feelings presented as free-text comments. The goal was to uncover patterns and present useful insights that had not appeared clearly before.

Both these analytical sources yielded a large amount of knowledge, creating a solid basis and platform for building smart, empathic and efficient services.

Simpler identification of preventive treatment

A proactive solution can be created, which will facilitate identification of preventive early treatment for psychological issues and mental ill health connected to cancer. Building a solution based on millions of lived experiences, insights and health data creates a platform for seeing patterns and indications that do not always appear clearly in an individual case.

The patient can get indications and knowledge that they should seek help from a psychologist, before they are aware of it themself.
The physician and healthcare staff can be prompted to ask the right questions when the patient makes a visit.

Through the use of, for example, chatbots based on Conversational AI, patients are guided to relevant self-service solutions. At the same time, relevant information that can be used in the patient’s future treatment is gathered.

Henrik Serlow

Head of Analytics

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