The Loops

Won Award for Best Cancer Hack at 2018 MIT Hacking Medicine Grandhack - Global Public Health Track

Our system seeks to empower young women/mothers to be the champions who will lead cervical cancer eradication by sharing their stories to raise awareness and reduce stigma around cervical cancer screening and young girls vaccination against Human Papillomavirus (HPV).

Our ultimate goal of this project is to stage Saudi Arabia to join the global effort towards eradicating cervical cancer through early detection (Screening) and prevention (Vaccination of girls between 8-13 years).

Role

• User Research
• Problem Definition
• Product Strategy
• Rapid Iteration
• Product Design

Team

• Physician, Global Public Health, Oncologist
• Non-Profit Organizer
• Urban Planner

Globally, cervical cancer is the 4th most common cancer among females.

The 5-year survival rate is 92% when detected early and 17% when late (spread to distant parts of the body).

Kickoff

Bringing it together

As soon as the typical early hackathon kickoff dust settled, our team didn't have a clear mission or specific goals. We interviewed world-class mentors available to us and conducted experience interviews and secondary research around the area of cancer screening. Given the expertise, we chose to target developing countries like Saudi Arabia who have a tough time raising awareness and adherence of cancer screening. Only 16.8% have had cervical cancer screening in Saudi Arabia according to Saudi Medical Journal.

Early Insights

We interviewed medical experts and individuals with analogous experiences. Our goals were to understand the challenges women faced in the awareness and adherence of cervical cancer screening and the mechanisms currently utilized by some.

Stigma causes unease and fear

Women were uneasy and fearful of what they think the invasive procedure entailed. In addition, the sensitivity of the subject created unnecessary social stigma that increased the fear and loneliness.

Awareness doesn't lead to action

Many women are generally aware of the need to get screened, however do not feel motivated or fear taking the step to get screened.

Society playing catch up

The recent rise in cervical cancer meant national institutions are trying to catch up and have no national programs to help raise awareness of the importance of early detection.

Reactive visits to the doctor

Women were less likely to participate in preventive health measures due to the existing healthcare model. Women generally visit for acute conditions. The country is in a transition to primary-care model.

Empowering champions of health

Introducing The Loops

This will be the first time where cancer preventive practices are introduced outside typical ineffective conventional methods in Saudi. Integrating technology, culture of strong social relationship and competition, and designing for behavior change leveraging BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model will help initiate preventive practices at younger age and eventually adherence to vaccination and screening behavior of other diseases at older age.

System Model

The simple loop system empowers women who have completed screening and want to help others by sharing their stories generate a network that utilizes network effect and competition to raise awareness and facilitate adherence.

View Stories

The entry point to view stories is as simple as receiving a message from a friend/family. We will partner with health clinics also that directs women to the homepage to view stories within the network. Stories convey a message beyond typical awareness stats to help ease the stigma around cervical cancer screening.

Take Action

After viewing the stories, it’s important to enable women to take immediate action and make an appointment. We want to go beyond just raising awareness and make impactful behavior change in adherence.

Share Stories

Leveraging the “reddit effect,” women who have completed the screening process are encouraged to share their stories to complete the loop and become champions of health.

Understand

Where we are today

To get as close to empathizing with our distant target audience, we leveraged interviews with medical experts, medical research and reddit threads that gave insights into personal experiences.

Existing Situations

We mapped out behavioral dimensions, existing flows and personal stakeholders to get a more rounded contextual understanding of our target population.

Behavior Buckets

Taking action requires many steps and so we highlighted phases along the screening journey. We mapped these against BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model to get a high level glimpse of action drop-off.

What's Out There

We researched the landscape of what is available for patients to address this challenge today. We noticed generally that given the range of screening procedures for different cancers, programs were specific to only individual cancers. Many also focused on linking to existing resources or the management of cancer, but not measures before reaching that point.

Ideas

Mechanisms to reduce stigma and close the loop on adherence

I facilitated discussion around the insights gathered and challenged the team to generate as many ideas as possible to solve the challenges. We grouped ideas around natural themes and areas of focus. We then utilized the Behavior Model as a framework to gauge the efficacy of the intervening ideas.

Working backwards from Adherence

I reversed the polarity of the screening experience to help orient around a north-star and spark creative discussion. Working backwards from our goal allowed us to take a fresh look at the challenge and think through impactful mechanisms to enable behavior change.

Rapid Ideas

We focused our attention of key themes of empowering women to share their stories and enabling women to take immediate action based on ideas that we felt projected tested well along the Behavior Model. I generated many different ideas around these themes from which we honed in on organizing a comprehensive system for awareness and adherence.

Detailed Design

The simple loop system empowers women who have completed screening and want to help others by sharing their stories generate a network that utilizes network effect and competition to raise awareness and facilitate adherence.

Testing

Resonance

We were taking a different approach than most systems, to highlight the personal stories to drive up motivation. We feared it would cause issues because the system was not centered around the typical medical resources.

In order to de-risk some of our assumptions, we leveraged the mentors, medical experts, and individuals to test early concepts of the designs. The personal stories of women who have gone through the process resonated well with participants, confirming our institution around personal connection.

Analysis and Logic Model

The project coordinator (PC) under the supervision of the program director will monitor the progress of work through a specific periods of time for each set of activities. Reviewing records of sufficient training of the team and accurate and complete data collection is an example of monitoring indicators that we will be using. The PC and the development lead will monitor the product development process and build up overtime. Financial statements and records will be monitored to ensure transparency and accountability of fund donation spending.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) such as User Engagement, Task Completion and Conversion Rate through web analytics at each step in the product journey will be evaluated against objectives and existing frameworks.

Scale and Sustainability

The Loops will help build capacity and ensure feasibility of the elimination of this cancer. The individual and institutional competition system will play an incentive role for sustainability. The generated data will drive national cancer control policy change. After Phase I, it can be generalized to similar settings and expand to include more facilities and other major cities. We also aim to work with the Ministry of Health to ensure young girls HPV vaccination. This model will scale to incorporate other preventive practices and target different populations.

Best Cancer Hack, Global Public Health

After presenting 2 full days of work in under 5 minutes to a panel of leaders in the health space, our team was awarded MIT Hacking Medicine's Best Cancer Hack in the Global Public Health track.