Patient engagement in oncology

Abstract

This in-company project has two main goals. The first one is to analyze the Belgian patient associations landscape in oncology by mapping out all Belgian cancer patient organizations for current and future IO indications. The second goal is to identify potential collaboration, to interview them, and to extract recommendations from these. These objectives resulted in a complete mapping of the patient organizations landscape, listing and describing 194 associations. Recommendations on how to collaborate with patient associations were provided, describing which projects could be implemented and which patient associations would be the most interesting for MSD in terms of importance, activities and alignment with MSD’s priorities. To understand which type of collaboration was needed, interviews were undertaken with several stakeholders. Nine topics, considered as addressing the whole spectrum of complaints, were identified: prevention, information, communication, aesthetic, sexual life, psychological follow-up, support, life after cancer, and digital-based tools. After, these were compared to scientific articles to validate or discard the results. Out of these nine topics, four were considered for potential collaborations. The identified fields were prevention, communication, cancer and work, and digitization. The idea was to build a complete image of MSD as not only a treatment provider but also a company acting on improving the patient’s quality of life. This would, in fine, improve MSD’s engagement with patients. Firstly, specific prevention actions might help to build a positive image of pharmaceutical companies by showing the real interest of the MSD in patients health. Secondly, the doctor’s communication was identified as a real issue for the patient’s mental health. Implementing an outlined communication training program for physicians would reduce the patient’s distress and help the oncologists to take more informed decisions. Thirdly, since returning to the workforce is an important post-treatment aspect of both financial and mental health, organizing coaching for patients facing this issue would tackle a big complaint. Finally, a long-term vision would include a digital-based tool to centralize and digitalize the patient’s journey