It is personal to us. It is estimated that almost half of the world population will be diagnosed with cancer during our lifetime. Most of us know a friend or a loved one who has needed to take up the struggle against cancer. The good news is that even with a growing number of cases, cancer can be treated and several patients have treatment options that did not exist a decade or two ago. Growingly, this is thanks to personalised healthcare.
Personalised healthcare has many definitions but it is essentially about providing the most optimal therapy to an individual at the right time. In doing so, the intent is to improve the quality of life and treatment outcomes for each patient. Early detection through screening and diagnostics which lead to a combination of targeted therapies and personalised care pathways combined with continuous monitoring and care management are key elements of personalised care.
Optimising a comprehensive care journey is not possible without listening to the patient and integrating real-time feedback to guide the journey. To call cancer care truly personalised, we need to support the patient with a meaningful digital companion. This is our goal at Kaiku Health – to provide the best possible personalised digital companion to every cancer patient.
Our Kaiku Health team joined Elekta one and a half years ago with the aim of providing cancer patients treated by Elekta’s customers in 120 countries with better means of participating in their own care. It has been truly inspiring to see Kaiku brought into the hands of patients in North America, South America, and the Asia Pacific in addition to the growing numbers in Europe. We also have taken a key step in successfully integrating Kaiku Health with Elekta’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering and workflows of MOSAIQ Plaza, a market-leading oncology informatics platform. These results are thanks to the close collaboration of our amazing teams in Helsinki, Sunnyvale California and around the globe captained by Andrew Wilson.
In 2022, I believe we will continue to see the accelerated adoption of digital services in healthcare as COVID-19 continues to amend our ways of interacting with one another. We will drive the adoption and usage of Kaiku Health through our dedication to the best user experience of patients and healthcare professionals. Looking at our roadmap, I am also thrilled to see the development and first adoption of machine learning-based predictive models that may help in early detection and even preventive management of symptoms and therapy-related toxicities.
Of course, building what is needed next is never easy – especially in healthcare. We have learned this firsthand during our almost 10 years in the business. But by working together with Elekta and our pharmaceutical partners, co-creating disease and therapy-specific digital patient support, and connecting to harmonised data lakes, we can further encourage the adoption of personalised healthcare for cancer patients around the world. As a byproduct, we are establishing an open ecosystem for researchers to utilise meaningful anonymised aggregated data that gives more accurate insights on real-world patient outcomes.
We are happy and humbled to be able to work daily on something that has a positive impact on the lives of many. I am extremely proud of our team of purpose-driven digital health professionals, and all the partners and customers with whom we get to work together to improve cancer care every day.
As a personal note, I am thankful to have the opportunity to dedicate my next 4 months to parental leave with our twin babies and 3-year-old son while my wife returns to work. During this time, my fellow co-founder and our Chief Product Officer and Deputy General Manager Henri Virtanen will lead our amazing team to progress our mission of improving the quality of life for cancer patients with companion digital therapeutics.
Last week at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, we enjoyed connecting with many partners at the virtual conference and I look forward to connecting with you again later in the spring. While I will be running after my kids between January and April, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Henri. Advancing personalised healthcare is personal to us.
Cheers from San Francisco,
Lauri
