Samira Daswani is CEO of Manta Cares. Her career in consulting and digital health startups took a left turn when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had 18 months of visits with 123 appointments, 5 ER visits and much more. And it was very hard to manage her journey. So she built a paper based map/guide and started distributing it via hospitals in the gift shops and elsewhere. Manta Cares is the digital instantiation of that cancer map with symptom tracking and an AI chatbot on top of the map. Samira demoed it extensively for me. She raised some seed funding, and is now building it out for 80% of cancers–Matthew Holt
Aneesh Chopra talks Cancer Navigation Challenge & more
Aneesh Chopra is the former CTO of the US under Obama. He’s now head of strategy at Arcadia, but this week is one of the driving forces behind the new challenge called “Transforming Cancer Navigation with Open Data & APIs” . I caught up with Aneesh about why the need for this type of data exchange and why caner, and also more generally about interoperability, data analysis (his day job) and the impact of AI. Aneesh is an optimist but also about the most articulate person in health care explaining what is going on the ground and in policy with the regulations and actions of data exchange, and its uses. Pay attention–Matthew Holt
