“With the increasing reliance of patients on online information about their diagnoses and treatments, it has become imperative for healthcare and pharmaceutical professionals to get insights into what patients are feeling and how they are reacting to various treatments and drugs.” 

So said Dr Alok Aggarwal, CEO and Chief Data Scientist at Voice of Cancer Patients (VoCP), in a recent article at India Analytics Magazine.  VoCP is a web-based platform that uses AI to organize millions of patient conversations at online web forums and social media platforms in order to gain meaningful insights for patients, caregivers, health-care providers and payers about cancer treatments and therapies.

According to the article, “the VoCP platform is not only limited to generic online platforms, but it can also ingest and analyse social media data that is provided by Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram etc. as well as blogs, news, articles, and scripts from more than 50 different languages.”

Voice of Cancer Patients initially started with a five-member team, offering insights on breast cancer from over a million conversations across various web forums. Less than two years later, the team has grown to 18, “offering insights from over 15.6 million conversations from 110+ websites covering 22 cancers, 2,652 drugs, 14,106 side effects, and 2,608 supportive therapies.”

The VoCP platform is also working with some top pharmaceutical companies, offering them customized and relevant insights through its advanced analytics platform and custom algorithms that operate across various disease areas, specific drugs, devices, or products.

“Through our VoCP platform, now doctors can learn more about patients’ views regarding the intensity of side effects or adverse effects related to drugs, regimens, and other treatments,” Dr. Alok explained. “This could help them in potentially improving the quality of life for their patients and reducing the number of patients abandoning their treatments.”

Talking about the crucial topics VoCP covers, the platform answers questions like:

    •           What cohort of patients is discussing a specific drug or side-effect?

    •           Which factors are contributing to various side-effects among patients?

    •           What are the factors affecting the quality of life of the patient?

“In the next two years, we plan to impact over 100,000 lives (100k+ active users) through our platform,” Dr Alok said. “We also plan to work with all major pharmaceutical and healthcare firms to help them gather relevant patient insights from social media and web forums that record patient experiences.”