PRIMARY RESEARCH AND INSIGHTS

PRIMARY RESEARCH

After speaking to our panels of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Cancer survivors, we got to know that:

1. Patients take different Integrative care approaches based on their personal experiences and symptoms. Hence, we realized that tackling integration as a whole would be too broad, and the best approach would be to solve for one. We looked at the landscape to understand what was most valuable. We chose to go ahead with Food and Nutrition, covering different aspects like diets, supplements, herbs, and mindful eating.
2. Attempting to provide nutritional support for all types of cancer would be ambitious. Each type of cancer requires different dietary assistance. Therefore, to begin with, we decided to focus on colorectal cancer, which has the highest dietary assistance needs compared to others and is the third most common type.

INSIGHTS:

1. Nutrition is an integral part of the Integrative care approach, being the basic need and fuel for your body. A balanced, nutritious diet boosts immunity and heals the mind, body, and soul to recover from the side effects of treatment.

2. There is limited time and access to resources. Nutrition is expensive, doctors don’t always have a lot of time and are indifferent towards discussing other care options. This results in irrevocably late advice and also self-advocacy by patients.

3. There’s a dangerous amount of information available at a click on Dr.Google, and yet there's a lack of streamlined information for the patients and their nutrition.

4. The emotional trauma associated with approaching nutritional care is massive, and due to the severe side effects that come with cancer treatment, there is a disconnection in their relationship with food.

SOLUTION

This brings us to our comprehensive service proposition:

DEAR DIET

Dear Diet is a nutrition hand-holder for Colorectal Cancer patients.

Dear Diet is a nutritional platform that gives streamlined information and personalized recommendations, allowing emotional and experiential mapping associated with food. This helps create awareness at an early diagnosis stage by encouraging healthy and sustainable eating habits for patients. In addition, it helps them recognise their personal nutrition patterns, helping them re-establish their relationship with food.

FUTURE IMPACT

This service is globally scalable, catering to all cancer types and representing a market size of 18.1 billion at present. We plan to begin with the UK.

Our strategy is to have these 17,200 colorectal patients in the UK, interested in Integrative Care become our early adopters. By gaining a strong foothold in this market segment and proving the viability and usefulness of our offering, we plan to expand horizontally for colorectal cancer patients in other English-speaking countries like the United States. This expansion would encompass an additional 153,000 potential patients.

Alongside, we will expand vertically to upper gastrointestinal cancers with similar dietary needs, eventually covering all cancer types, aligning with our overarching vision of providing holistic well-being for all cancer patients worldwide.

Dear Diet hugely impacts the following stakeholders:

1. Cancer Patients: provides affordable nutrition advice minimizing the overwhelming anxiety and severe side effects throughout the treatment. It gives back their lost control,  helping them understand their individual nutrition needs through symptom and pattern tracking.

2. Doctors, Nutritionists and Integrative Cancer Carers: help them dedicate more time to specific cases, enhance audience connection, and facilitate integrative care advocacy, fostering a healthy doctor-patient relationship and doctors can focus on treating cancer.

3. Medical Institutions & Research Centres: the collected data has the potential to aid future research and correlate food choices with clinical outcomes for all cancer types not just individually but also culturally. Medical professionals can access this data as electronic health records, which can be translated into reports using AI, facilitating a deeper understanding of each case's specificity.