Designing Trust into the Cancer Care Journey

Role: UX Lead, CTCA Patient Support Platform (now City of Hope)

Challenge

The American healthcare system makes cancer harder to navigate than the disease itself. Patients juggle multiple doctors who don't talk to each other, manage medications and appointments through brain fog, and call the office with basic questions because nothing else is open. Meanwhile, doctors lose time on calls that didn't need a doctor, and patients lose confidence in care they can't see.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America (now City of Hope) wanted to fix the fragmentation. The mandate: an MVP platform connecting patients to their care team 24/7, with end-to-end support across the cancer journey, focused on chat and symptom management. As UX lead, I was tasked with validating the assumptions and shipping something patients would actually trust.

How i led

I led a cross-functional team over a 10-week engagement. We started with research, conducting four rounds of interviews with nine former cancer patients, five nurses, and three doctors, plus regular sessions with CTCA's advising care coordinator. The findings pointed to a single critical need: what patients wanted most was to feel consistently informed and supported, especially in the moments between visits.

That insight shaped the platform. I designed the key MVP screens around moments that mattered most. A Symptom Management Tracker so patients could distinguish normal medication reactions from symptoms that needed urgent attention. A Goals Tracker. A Daily To-Do List. A Nurse Admin Interface that gave the care team a way to respond at scale. Throughout the build, I worked closely with engineers and product managers to keep the patient-facing experience and the technical architecture aligned.Outcome

Our efforts resulted in significant advancements in cancer care navigation:

what it delivered

Successful MVP Launch: Launched the platform with We launched the MVP with integrated chat functionality linking patients to a live nurse admin system. CTCA used the platform to pilot with partner cancer treatment clinics, and the work helped them secure additional Series A funding from investors. The platform improved care coordination, reduced gaps in communication, and gave patients 24/7 access to their care team for the first time.

The deeper outcome: a foundation for transforming how cancer care is delivered, with patient trust and care team efficiency designed in from the start.