In 2017, 400 000 people were diagnosed with cancer. In France, 3 million people live with this disease. The disease also impacts their relatives and professional life.
New therapies are created. Some of them, administered at home, represent a big hope, but they also generate new challenges in terms of care and follow-up.
Patients share their weakness facing these new therapies. Testimonies were registered by the valuable NGO work led for the project Cancer@dom. Here are some quotations:
“I felt overwhelmed, alone at home, I was not able of doing anything anymore”
A patient suffering from skin cancer, 53 years old, Paris Region
“We were discovering undesirable effects bit by bit. There are so many things that are not explained”
Mother of a child suffering from a metastatic neuroblastoma, Paris Region
“When needed, I call my brother and we go to the hospital. Then, I go to the hospital unit and I directly ask the question.”
A patient suffering from bone cancer. 24 years old, Paris Region
The more vulnerable, socially or geographically isolated the patients are, the more they feel abandoned.
Continuum+ has developed, in collaboration with the association « Patients en Réseau » (Patients in network), a care program called AKO@dom to solve these issues. It aims at securing medical care, improving the adherence and the quality of life of the patients by the early identification and care of undesirable effects.
In the program AKO@dom, the liberal nurse visits the patient at home during the first 3 months of the treatment. With a smartphone app, the nurse transmits the monitoring data on a secure platform dedicated to medical professionals who follow the patients.
Beyond the data accessible on the platform, the nurse also gets in touch with the medical professionals involved in solving the situations.
AKO@dom was tested for metastatic kidney cancer treatment. 25 patients of hospitals in the East of France benefited from the solution. A second pilot has been launched for metastatic breast cancer in several hospitals in the East of France and the Northern region of France.
AKO@dom is deployed nationally, with very promising results for patients with breast or kidney cancers.
