Two Online Health Leaders Team Up to Assist US Cancer Patients
HealthUnlocked (HealthUnlocked.com), one of the world’s largest social networks for patients, is teaming up with Patient Power (PatientPower.info), the pioneering channel that features online videos with experts for cancer patients. The goal is to facilitate more active discussions among cancer experts and cancer patients and family members who live in the U.S. and fill a need not satisfied by Facebook or most patient advocacy organizations.
London based HealthUnlocked attracts more than 3.5m visits a month to its 600 healthcare communities from people all over the world, although the US is the largest group of users representing over one third of all visits. As the company seeks to provide more support to US patients it sees Patient Power as a highly desirable strategic partner. “We have always admired Patient Power for the quality and topicality of its video content, and it deserves more exposure along with the interactive patient-to-patient conversations our platform facilitates,” says HealthUnlocked co-founder Dr. Matt Jameson Evans.
Patient Power, the producer of more than 2,000 videos for cancer patients, will create additional communities on HealthUnlocked focusing on the needs of US patients who have conditions including several blood cancers and solid tumors. “We see this as different from what’s on Facebook,” says Patient Power founder Andrew Schorr. “These will be disease-specific conversations for people in the US healthcare system and on a platform that doesn’t mingle with other aspects of a patient’s private life.”
Because of the quickening pace of change in cancer research, HealthUnlocked and Patient Power will also work together to step up education of patients about clinical trials, invite their input about research directions, and make them aware of clinical trial and market research opportunities that might be right for them. “Over 70% of people that join our network want to take part in research in order to advance knowledge of disease and through HealthUnlocked we can easily connect them with the organisations running this research” says Jameson-Evans.
Andrew Schorr, who has faced two cancer diagnoses himself, says the timing of this partnership is important, “If we really want to help patients with serious diagnoses like cancer, innovative organizations like ours must work together to help patients know they are not alone and to put them in a more powerful position to get the best care. I am excited about the marriage of online conversation and education that we will accomplish together for US cancer patients and their loved ones.”
Patient Power’s new US-oriented cancer communities can be found here and will be growing over the next months:
MPNs America https://healthunlocked.com/p2mpnamerica
CLL AmericaL https://healthunlocked.com/p2cllamerica
Myeloma America https://healthunlocked.com/p2mmyamerica
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