Dr Amila Patel: Patients Readily Adopt Digital Health Solutions to Connect to Care Team

Navigating Cancer has found patients, including those who are elderly, are adopting applications to stay connected with their care teams, said Amila Patel, PharmD, chief clinical officer, Navigating Cancer.

Transcript

Now that we've seen an increased use in digital health solutions due to the pandemic, what have we learned about how patients use these solutions and which patients use them?

Yeah, so I think what we've learned the most is that patients are doing more from their mobile devices, and one of the highest drivers of usage of these mobile health tools is that they want to stay connected to their health care team.

The other thing that I think we've seen is that we've dispelled the myth that elderly patients won't access or adopt these tools. The vast majority of patients using our platform today are over the age of 65. And we need to really make these tools easy for that patient population to use, because that's highly representative of the overall cancer population today.

At Navigating Cancer, we have a web-based application that's very mobile friendly and easy to use, instead of using a native app that patients have to download. That's one way that we've broken through that barrier.