Addressing Inequities in The Underserved Cancer Patient Journey

What do you take for granted in your own healthcare experience?

The Context

How would living in poverty or in a remote community impact your access to cancer care? How would you cope with racialized treatment, a language barrier or being dismissed, judged, or marginalized? These are some of questions we asked when our clients asked us to help them understand the underserved cancer patient journey and Identify opportunities to advance health equity for these patients.

The Challenge

Our client wanted to gain a deep, empathic understanding of the underserved oncology patient's lived experience including their situational context, social determinants of health (SDoH), factors influencing cancer care receipt, as well as their unmet needs, barriers and gaps to receiving standard of care (SOC) across the cancer treatment journey.

Our Approach

DIY / niche recruitment to reach those who are marginalized and outside of the general MR population
In-person ethnographic interviews with ethnographer + videographer
Interactive journey map with embedded video

Our Impact

We learned that we didn't know what we didn't know and invalidated many assumptions. We learned how hard it is to reach those who exist outside of the system and created a Playbook for reaching them. We learned that the variables impacting positive outcomes were not around access to SOC but about SHoD, and through that insight redirected our client's initiatives to focus on interventions that helped removed SDoH barriers. We galvanized a cross-functional team and began a movement to design for the needs of all patients, including those who are traditionally marginalized.

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