Cancer patients go through a lot during treatment. Many patients need support from other patients who know what they are going through because family and friends, no matter how supportive they try to be, don’t always understand their struggles.
The Opal Health Informatics Group is developing two programs for supporting cancer patients in the portal Opal: OncoBuddy and OncoConseil. OncoBuddy is a support system that matches cancer patients with volunteer patients (we call them buddies) based on a matching algorithm that considers criteria selected by the patients themselves. OncoConseil, on the other hand, matches patients with threads of information that might interest them, such as tips and tricks to get a smoother experience during the treatment.
This project focuses on finding selection criteria for building the matching algorithm. Using semi-structured interviews with cancer patients, we will extract a panel of selection criteria that are the most valued by patients, such as type of cancer, age and gender of the buddy, stage of cancer, etc.