WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Biden
Cancer Initiative today convened a national Biden Cancer Summit,
with the anchor event in Washington,
D.C., and more than 450 Community Summits held where people
live, work, learn and worship around the country. The effort
brings together thousands of people to focus national attention on
the "urgency of now" to create actionable solutions in the fight
against cancer.
Participants from across sectors, disciplines and
backgrounds actively explored solutions to some of the most
complicated challenges standing in the way of progress – from
sharing and standardizing data to addressing value and coverage of
lifesaving treatments. The D.C. Summit culminated in a Cancer Town
Hall with Vice President Joe Biden
and experts in cancer prevention, research, care and
survivorship fielding questions from a broad-based audience.
The Biden Cancer Initiative also today announced more than 50
new commitments. These are public and private sector efforts
developed in response to Vice President Joe
Biden and Dr. Jill Biden's
call to double the rate of progress against cancer. These
announcements include:
- Airbnb's expansion of its Open Homes platform to include
medical stays, allowing hosts both in the
United States and around the world to open their homes for
free to those traveling for medical treatment or
respite;
- The "Health Record Wizard" project by X4 Health which is a new
tool that allows patients to leverage their HIPAA "right of access"
to their own electronic medical records;
- Family Reach's partnership with AbbVie that allows it to expand
financial services to 25 hospitals in 25 states across the country,
enhancing financial support for an estimated 4,400 additional
families;
- WeWork's new Collaboration Hubs providing the space, platform
and people for researchers, patients, caretakers and survivors
to share information and collaborate to fight cancer together;
and
- National Minority Quality Forum's Cancer Index Atlas, a portal
providing 2016 patient-level data for breast, colorectal,
prostate, lung, endometrial and blood cancers to address cancer
health equity concerns.
For a complete list of commitments, please visit
www.bidencancer.org/commitments.
Throughout the day, on stage at the Summit in D.C. and on social
media, people shared stories epitomizing what it means to be cancer
FIERCE — from community activists to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,
WWE legends to football players, chief medical officers to science
phenoms. This builds on the Biden Cancer Initiative's #cancerFIERCE
campaign to tell stories of purpose, resilience and
strength.
In addition, global communities – from San Marcos, Texas, to San Pedro Sula,
Honduras, from Erbil, Iraq, to Ithaca, New
York — were able to engage in real-time, immersive
conversations about the shared cancer experience through
Shared Studios Portals.
Jill Biden, co-chair of the Biden
Cancer Initiative, said: "Today's summit is about finding
solutions. Right now, if we stopped new research entirely, if we
never spent another dime on lab studies to find new cures — we
could still save thousands more lives by doing one thing: breaking
down the barriers between the various branches of this movement and
sharing the data that already exists. If researchers were able to
access all of this data, they could find new answers – like finding
patterns in the stars, researchers could find new patterns in the
data to help us understand how to best target therapies to
particular cancers or where disparities in outcomes are the most
severe, so that we could target prevention and screening
programs."
Vice President Joe Biden,
co-chair of the Biden Cancer Initiative, said: "Our focus is
straightforward: to create the cancer research and care system
that most people think we already have — and that we all
deserve. We are delighted and overwhelmed with people and
institutions offering their help and ideas, but we can't claim
victory until we have changed the things we cannot accept. We
cannot accept disparities in outcomes by race, gender and zip
code. We cannot accept unaffordable treatments. We cannot
accept business-as-usual practices in research and care when there
is nothing 'usual' about a cancer diagnosis."
Summit main-stage programs online at
www.bidencancer.org/summit.
Join the conversation online: #BidenCancerSummit.
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SOURCE Biden Cancer Initiative