“Where is the nearest cancer hospital?”; “Where can I get a wig for my mother?”; “Do airlines have a discount for cancer patients?”
When a loved one is suffering from cancer, you have questions, you are angry… And catering to all of these feelings and queries is city-based CancerHelpline. Having been a techie all her life with a heart beating for healthcare, Sonali Srungaram founded CIPHER, a company that also has a nationwide free helpline service (18002002676; Monday to Saturday 10 am to 5 pm) for cancer patients and their relatives.
“I worked as a strategy consultant with an IT company for 12 years, lived in various countries and then finally moved back home to Hyderabad. But healthcare had been my passion all along,” says Sonali, the ISB grad. “We realised there was a gap in disease management. The cost for treatment for cancer is around '2.5 lakh per patient, and when a loved one is suffering from cancer, everyone takes a second opinion. We help them make a decision.”
Today, they receive calls from over 40 patients per day, get 350-400 hits on their website each day and in just one year of the helpline’s operation, they have had 7,500 patients calling them. But their involvement in the lives of cancer patients wasn’t decided by them. “We started off by doing cancer awareness sessions. And before we knew it, we were thrown in the treatment area with people asking us ‘where should we go?’ And that’s when we realised we can’t back off from here,” says Sonali.
A typical day in the office starts with the team calling back people who might have called in the night as their operational hours are from 9.30-6. “We never miss a call. We call them back. If their queries are something that even we aren’t sure about, we consult our panel of doctors — who have an hour set aside every day for us — and then call the patient back. We also have follow up calls where we call a week and a month after a person had called us.”
Surprising as it may seem, not everyone in the team is from a medical field. “Some of them have studied BTech, some have done biotech, but they are all people who have a passion for medicine,” says Sonali.
But don’t they run a risk of giving wrong advice to patients? “We never give direct advice or a treatment solution; or we never mention only one hospital that the patient should go to. If they are confused about two different procedures, we give them the breakdown of both the procedures and then it’s their call,” says Sonali.
She adds that each one of their employees had to undergo a strict recruitment process. “And when they do get selected, they have to undergo a two-month training process, where they don’t just study the research books on cancer but they are also taught how to be empathetic towards these callers, because that’s more important. That’s why each person in the team is called a case manager. Sometimes, a caller might just break down about the low body image he or she has now, and the case manager has to be there for that person too. It can be something as simple as saying, ‘You’re beautiful’,” she adds. And as they have callers from all across India, they also have people who can speak English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Odiya and Bengali.
For Sonali, there’s a personal connect too. “Within a month of me starting this company, a family member was diagnosed with cancer,” she says, adding, “We have 33 lakh cancer patients in the country and the treatment available can only solve 10 per cent of those cases. We have 230 hospitals in the country that offer all sorts of treatment related to cancer but all of these hospitals are only in six cities. We are providing a macro view on what cancer in India looks like.”
Coming from a tech background, Sonali almost talks like someone who has studied medicine; but the mother of two says, “I’m still learning,” she says, adding, “For me too the decision to quit my previous job started with the need to be with my children. Even now, once I leave the office and go home, which is right upstairs, I’m just a regular mother.”
