Navya Care: Reaching out to cancer patients in the developing world
The Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH), where patients from around the world come for the best cancer treatment because of best experts and doctors, has been unaffordable to people below the poverty line.
To reach out to more cancer patients across the world, TMH has come up with an app making it easier for those who cannot afford to travel to Mumbai for the treatment. Patients can avail expert advice through application. TMH developed the app ‘Navya’ in collaboration with the National Cancer Grid (NCG). A patient can send their detailed reports through the app and then it is consulted with the country’s best experts based on pathology reports and radiology tests like CT scan, positron emission tomography (PET) scans or MRI.
“TMC NCG Navya Online” (www.navya.care) provides multidisciplinary evidence-based expert opinions within 24 hours to thousands of cancer patients in urban and non-urban areas in the developing world. A prospective study assessing the real world impact of this service concluded that patients shared the expert opinions with their treating providers and received evidence-based treatment.
Since the hospital started the service in association with Navya Network and the National Cancer Grid in 2014, it has been used by as many as 10,779 patients from 22 different countries, including the US and the UK.
Expanding the service to the non-urban USA and the western world can maximize cancer care outcomes, globally as there is a scarcity of expert oncologists in the world. Patients in nonurban areas have poor access to evidence-based treatment decisions and worse outcomes.
“In India, there are approximately 1,600 oncologists for 1.8 million patients and the lack of expertise translates to suboptimal and expensive treatment decisions. Navya’s informatics based expert opinion service, scalably provides multidisciplinary evidence based treatment opinions on-time and empowering every patient,” said Dr. C Pramesh, Coordinator National Cancer Grid.
This study was conducted among 914 patients who registered with the service between July 2016 and March 2017. From the 90 per cent who responded, 78 per cent of patients said they had followed treatments recommended by Navya.
“The finding that a high proportion of the patients are sharing the reports with their treating oncologist and that most proceed with the recommended treatments, demonstrates that the online service has wide approval among both patients as well as local physicians and oncologists,” said hospital director Dr. Rajendra Badwe.
Gitika Srivastav, founder of Navya said, “Navya’s vision is to meaningfully move the needle in the way cancer care is delivered. This study shows that the informatics based system and service is scalable and has positively impacted patients from all over the developing world. Expanding the reach of this service can maximize outcomes for patients, especially those in no urban areas, across the world.”
Doctors’ opinions are based on pathology reports and radiology tests like CT scan, PET scans, or MRI, which patients can send over to Navya. “We use the patient’s medical reports and consult the country's best experts and our databases of medical research and outcomes of similar patients,” added Srivastava.
Once the test reports and the patient’s medical history is received, a patient’s advocate or assistant from Navya presents it to the relevant experts for their opinion. The doctors then prepare a report that answers the patient’s questions in layman’s terms.
NCG is an association of 108 cancer centres, with a mandate to standardize cancer care, nationally. It is the largest global network of cancer centres collaborating to use technology and training to bring cancer expertise to every oncologist and cancer patient in India. The Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) of which TMH is apart is Asia’s largest leading tertiary care expert cancer centre, seeing over 67,000 cancer patients every year. Its strength necessitates a responsibility to make the expertise available to patients across India and developing countries, especially those who reside in locations where there are no expert cancer care centres.