Will You Join Us?

An invitation to shape how patients find clinical trial treatment options.

Where to start?

Our plans to launch a Carebox Blog remained relegated to the “nice ideas” list for quite a while. When we issued a launch announcement of the Carebox Connect application, that was clearly a compelling reason to rescue the blog from languishing in that list, and make it a reality. Which left only one question… where to start?

Do we start with the history of Carebox and how we got here? The Carebox Connect vision and roadmap? What we’ve learned in two decades (plus) of navigating over one million patients to clinical trials?

Maybe a discussion of ClinicalTrials.gov challenges? How we think we are different than other clinical trial search, matching, and referral applications for patients?

All of those are important subjects and each can – and hopefully soon will – translate into a series of Carebox Blog posts that we very much want to share. But where do we start?

“Challenge Identified”

At the Patients as Partners conference we attended last month, we had a chance to hear Stacy Hurt speak. I can’t do Stacy’s story justice if I try to retell it, so I’ll just share the opening paragraph from her “About” section in LinkedIn, and recommend that you read more about her and follow her, there:

Two devastating diagnoses disrupted but did not deter my 25 year career as a #healthcare/pharma executive. Through #advocacy as a #caregiver for my son with a nano #raredisease and as a survivor through my 5 year fight against stage IV #colorectalcancer, I persisted to identify what I could glean from these challenges to improve the #patientexperience and our system as a whole.

Then we saw that Stacy posted about an “undercover” exercise she did in asking her son’s geneticist how she could find out about #clinicaltrials. She concluded her post with this:

Challenge identified -> the need for greater awareness of, access to, and navigation of clinical trials. How can we solve this problem?
And so we had our answer to “where to start?”.

Challenge Accepted

We’ll start with Stacy’s challenge – with the frustration of overwhelmed patients and their caregivers. With the realization that you’re not very likely to learn of the treatment options in clinical trials from your doctor. With the recognition that self-research is daunting and fraught with inequity. With what Stacy wrote in her post and what was in commenter replies. Stacy’s identified challenge is at the core of what we do at Carebox.

What We Think We Want

We think we know some of what we all want in order to address the challenge. We want to quickly answer the question “what treatment options are there in clinical trials research that might be relevant for me (or my loved one)?” for everyone around the world, in any language, for any condition.

We want to make it easy for doctors to be aware of clinical trial options at the point of care. We want to be proactive in letting patients and caregivers know about new research in real-time, without flooding them with too much information. We want to be well-integrated with the advocacy groups and online information sources that patients use most.

Carebox has a lot of experience to draw from. On our website, you can see some of the prestigious partners we work with. We’ve learned a lot from each collaboration and each solution we’ve built.

A New First Step

We also know there is much more that we don’t yet know about how to really meet the challenge. And we’re very committed to keep working to learn… and to “do”.

We decided that a key next step on the road to meeting the challenge was to take what we do already know and bring it to life. The first step within that first step was the launch of the Carebox Connect application.

We still have a lot more to do to implement everything we think we already know as part of the new Carebox Connect application. And we’ll use this blog to share what we’ve added (when we do) and what we’re working on next.

Will You Join Us?

More importantly, we want to be listening to so many who have experienced the challenges first-hand and are willing to share their ideas on how it could have been better for them. We want to hear ideas for features and approaches – aspirational and directional, or specific and nitty-gritty.

We hope this blog will inspire anyone and everyone reading who has ideas and is willing to share, to do so. We’re getting started on something new and potentially (we think) very big. We welcome everyone – supportive and encouraging, or skeptical and critical (we don’t think those are contradictory) – to join us on the journey.

An invitation

My name is Brian Weiss. I’m the CEO of a company called Carebox.

My hope for this blog is that it becomes a way to share the steps we are taking and the mistakes we make (and how we hope to fix them). The ideas we are working on and how others can help us get them right.

We’re in a space that has us waking up every morning passionate and excited, but also very humble and wary. Like everyone in the world, we are all patients and caregivers. We are big fans of those like Stacy who speak and “do” for so many others. We hope to be worthy of being part of their circle, and their partners in the search for answers to some of their challenges.

I invite you drop us a comment/reply wherever you see this article posted by Carebox. Even better, use the Contact Us form on our website to submit your thoughts– I personally read, and will do my best to respond to, every one.

#Blog

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