The Issue:

It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to hear that cancer cells are invading your body, unless you’ve actually gone through it. It is even harder to accept the aggressive actions necessary to fight the cancer. While, sadly, we live at a time when roughly 40%* of us will develop cancer in our lifetime, most of us won’t experience it until we are well into our senior years. This means that most corporate staff members of a health system are likely to experience cancer through older family members or friends, not personally.

 

For the marketing team at Yale New Haven Health, we aimed to bring them closer to what cancer is like for their patients. They wanted to differentiate their cancer center, Smilow Cancer Hospital, as a hospital that brings optimism to its patients through better care and better results. In order to understand what optimism looks like for cancer patients, we needed to truly empathize with what they go through during treatment and beyond.

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*According to the National Cancer Institute, 2023 

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Lens of Empathy:

We reached out to cancer patients and gently asked them to share with us each stage of their cancer journey. We heard from people who were currently in treatment and those who were in remission, across different types of cancer. We listened, we observed their struggles and we tried to imagine ourselves in their situation. This helped us create a patient journey map that reflected on every monumental step a cancer patient experiences.

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Our Impact:

By appreciating and visualizing the stages of cancer, from diagnosis to remission or recurrence, we were able to identify specific moments in which the health system could offer more compassionate care to its patients. From there, we created more meaningful communications by connecting with people at moments in their journey with more relevant and caring messaging. As a result, we gave a highly reputable health system a deeper way to connect with cancer patients by acknowledging the emotional upheavals and courageous acts that come with enduring cancer.