How can the quality of life be improved for patients living with hepatocellular carcinoma, the most severe form of liver cancer? To find out, Hack for HCC was born, a hackathon promoted by Roche in collaboration with H-FARM that brought together over 70 Italian experts to imagine new treatment and assistance strategies for patients and their families, rewarding the most innovative projects born in the course of the event.
The winning projects
Three winning projects that respond to as many challenges: “E-Referral Epatocarcinoma“, A platform dedicated to local health companies, general practitioners and specialists, to facilitate the multidisciplinary management of individual patients; “Lidia Liver Diary”, A real logbook shared between doctors and patients in the double digital and paper version; is “Wiki HCC”, The suggestive idea of the third winning group of the hackathon: a virtual bulletin board in which to converge useful information for specialists, patients and caregivers.
The three challenges to be faced to improve care
Hepatocellular carcinoma still represents one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in the world today. It is an aggressive neoplasm, for which few treatment options are available. It requires multidisciplinary management that is not easy to organize and often has important comorbidities that contribute to worsening the patients’ quality of life. For this reason it is important to imagine new innovative strategies to improve the clinical management of patients.
“The Hack for HCC project was born to listen to doctors and strengthen the multidisciplinary approach on the national territory, to put ‘individual’ professionals in contact by stimulating the comparison between specialists on the advantages of the different therapeutic options available and on the correct way of proceed, ”he explains Filomena Morisco, Professor of Gastroenterology and director of the School of Specialization in diseases of the digestive system at the University of Naples Federico II. “Given the complexity of the pathology and the multiple skills necessary to treat it at its best, one of the three challenges of the hackathon wanted to investigate how to best support the Italian multidisciplinary teams. In fact, large centers can be structurally ready to manage even the most innovative therapies, but multidisciplinary sharing is often lacking. Another challenge faced was that relating to the training of specialists, which is increasingly important in a rapidly evolving therapeutic context such as that of hepatocarcinoma ”. Alongside the new therapies and the management of the pathology by specialists, another important issue addressed by Hack for HCC was that relating to the quality of life of patients. In fact, one of the three challenges of the hackathon focused on assistance to patients and caregivers, who play a fundamental role alongside those suffering from hepatocellular cancer.
The philosophy of Hack for HCC
With the three challenges in mind, the specialists who participated in Hack for HCC were divided into multidisciplinary teams and faced the competition, devising and proposing innovative solutions. Judging the projects presented, a panel of experts selected the best initiatives according to precise evaluation criteria, including adherence to the challenge, originality, measurability of the solution, feasibility and impact on the health system. “Promoting a synergistic collaboration of all the interlocutors involved in the treatment of the disease can represent a great help in improving its management not only for patients but also for caregivers: it is essential to build local and regional networks in order to trace rapid routes to hospital structures highly specialized, reducing the now known and fruitless pilgrimages of patients to inadequate structures ”, he concludes Ivan Gardini, President of the EpaC Onlus Association: “We hope that this initiative can help improve patient care and optimal management of the disease”.
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