Kristine White, Spectrum Health
(This post is the first of a two-part series. Click here to view Part II.)
Imagine that you are a 28-year-old single mother, and you’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Three times a week, you must drive 100 miles each way for treatment. Your family and friends love you, and are doing all they can to support you … but the truth is, you also need someone who knows what you are feeling, who has “walked in your shoes.” Someone who knows the challenges ahead, someone you can talk to about how will you keep your job, your kids in soccer, your sanity. Where do you turn for help?
This is a real challenge for many cancer patients. Approximately 3 years ago, a patient expressed frustration that there was no process, no system of connecting the newly diagnosed to survivors. 
She was very passionate about this. She said, “Kris, I am getting calls from ‘friend of friends’, asking me if I can meet with them to talk about what it’s like to go through a cancer journey. I find myself meeting women in the restroom at the grocery store and end up lifting my shirt to show what a bilateral mastectomy looks like. There’s got to be a better way.” We looked around the country and saw places matching patients based on medical history—connecting 30-year-old women with breast cancer, for example, with each other. But that wasn’t the need our patients were articulating.
But imagine again that you’re the patient mentioned before, with the daunting list of challenges. Will any 28-year-old survivor work as a mentor?
So with our cancer program’s Patient and Family Advisory Council, we created the “With You”TM program. The program links newly diagnosed cancer patients with survivors. We built a database that collects information about both survivors and new patients. Then we let the newly diagnosed patient decide what is important to him or her in a match. For some, it’s exact medical condition. They want somebody with the same type of cancer. For others, the type of cancer is not nearly as important as a range of other factors such as marital status, religious beliefs, socioeconomic challenges, etc.
And perhaps most importantly, our patients knew that Spectrum Health, a trusted entity, was evaluating participants, coaching the survivors and standing behind the program. We don’t simply match people; we support both the newly diagnosed patient and the survivor. You can get online and blog with anybody, but you don’t know who is on the other end of that. In this program, called “With You”, you can trust the team that is there for you.
(This post is the first of a two-part series. Click here to view Part II.)
About Kristine White
Kristine White is the Vice President of Innovation and Patient Affairs at Spectrum Health Systems in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Kris is leading initiatives that use a variety of the latest technologies, all working together, to enhance patient engagement. Spectrum Health is a not-for-profit, integrated health system that includes a medical center, regional community hospitals, a dedicated children’s hospital, a multi-specialty medical group and a nationally recognized health plan.
For more information, visit www.spectrum-health.org
