Case study 3 of 5 · Decided by attention
A family facing a new cancer diagnosis needs the next step and a number to call. The site gave them encyclopedia entries.
Scaling oncology navigation for 30 million annual visitors
I led digital product for an oncology information and patient-engagement platform with 30 million annual visitors, and turned clinical protocols into plain-language steps patients and families could follow.
- My part
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Director of Digital Products & Strategy — the first product and technical hire
- Led a cross-functional R&D team of 14, onshore and offshore, across three products.
- Decided which vendors would rebuild the platform, then ran their delivery: three engagements worth more than $2M.
- The call
- Rebuilt the platform around plain-language care pathways and a direct route to a nurse.
- Turned down
- The encyclopedia entries a family met at midnight.
- Result
- Chat conversions up 267% and bounce rate down 25% across 30 million annual visitors.
Scaling oncology navigation for 30 million annual visitors · Kanav Jain · kanav.net
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−25%
Bounce rate
From the platform rebuild and clinical navigation overhaul.
-
+267%
Chat conversions
From the same platform rebuild and clinical navigation overhaul.
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30M
Annual visitors
The oncology information platform the relaunch had to keep running.
Context
CancerCompass was a Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) venture. City of Hope acquired CTCA in 2022; CancerCompass had wound down before the deal. The platform was overwhelming users with dense clinical prose.
Oncology guidance has to be clinically exact: every plain-language simplification had to withstand oncologist and nursing review. To rebuild the platform, I had to stand up a new technology stack and engineering team while keeping live traffic running. 1 2
The decision
I relaunched the platform around plain-language care pathways and direct nursing triage. I put the product team and the nursing staff on a standing review of what patients were actually asking, so the triage rules could be retuned against real questions and still clear oncologist review.
| Product | Audience | My role |
|---|---|---|
| Health information site — CancerCompass | Patients and families; 30 million annual visitors | Relaunched it around plain-language care pathways and direct nursing triage |
| Hospital digital-marketing platform — CancerCenter, a separate property from CancerCompass | Hospital marketing: content, acquisition, and measurement | Product direction; defined its place in the rebuild’s stack |
| Patient-engagement web app — the CancerCompass web application, distinct from the information site above | Patients and families | Product direction; defined its stack and wrote the Director of Development role to build it |
What happened
The three products were the health information site, a hospital digital-marketing platform, and a patient-engagement web app. I directed the rebuild of the contact center on Salesforce Health Cloud and set up feedback loops so nursing teams could keep tuning the triage rules and cut avoidable escalations.
Bounce rate fell 25% and chat conversions rose 267% across 30 million annual visitors after I relaunched the platform and reworked its clinical navigation.
What I’d keep
A frightened person is not short of information. The scarce resource is attention and trust, so the product’s job is the next step and a person to call.
Everything I built here assumed it: plain-language pathways in place of encyclopedia entries, and a nurse one step away, with the product team reading what patients asked so the triage rules kept up. The AI products I build now start from the same assumption.
Next step
Advisory and fractional product leadership for healthcare and AI ventures. I partner with technical founders to take complex clinical systems through review, unblock patient adoption, and build products that last.
Sources
1 CancerCompass ownership
CancerCompass was owned and operated by Cancer Treatment Centers of America Marketplace, LLC.
The USPTO record names Cancer Treatment Centers of America Marketplace, LLC as the owner. The trademark was filed on 19 November 2020 and abandoned when the platform wound down before the acquisition.
Documents described, not republished
- Platform tech-stack architecture Defined July 2020 for the rebuild — two properties over one delivery pipeline and one contact center. Redrawn above; the original is an internal CTCA document.
- Director of Development job description The role I wrote to build the team: a hands-on technology leader for a remote development group — onshore contractors and a contracted team in Eastern Europe, shipping weekly with no separate IT or QA function.
The bounce-rate, chat-conversion, and annual-visitor figures come from my records. CancerCompass wound down before the CTCA acquisition and its analytics did not survive, so none of the three can be checked against a public source. The sources above cover platform ownership and the acquisition only, and back no figure on this page.
Revised