Our story begins several years ago, when Avva's two founders, Antoine Sindhu and Aris Theologis, were undergraduate students at Stanford University. We spent over a year volunteering with a leading breast oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Institute who had a vision to improve the quality of care and experience for her patients through technology. We worked with her to build a comprehensive website
with information about treatment options, side effects, frequently asked questions, clinical trials, and more. We interacted with breast cancer patients daily, shadowed the oncologist during visits, and worked directly with her staff, all with the goal of improving the cancer patient's experience and treatment outcomes. After finishing this project, we felt that we had only scratched the surface of what solutions were possible to address the vast and varied needs of cancer patients during treatment. Drawing upon our previous experience and hundreds more conversations with cancer survivors across the country, we built a simple web-based prototype tool to help patients prepare for important visits with their physicians. Over the course of a year, we refined and evolved the tool based on patient feedback, transitioning to a mobile iPhone app and continuously building and refining its functionality. The result was our first iPhone app, Avva Advocate, a mammogram tracker and visit prep tool for breast cancer patients. After releasing Advocate and hearing feedback from our initial users, we decided we needed to broaden our audience to help us reach a greater number of cancer patients. We went back to the drawing board and designed a new app, with similar functionality but broadly applicable to any cancer patient, not only breast cancer, which incorporated all of the learning and feedback we had gathered up to that point. Our second app, Avva Ask, was the result. Our simple, elegant, patient-focused apps are freely available for download in the iTunes store. Take control of your treatment journey, or help empower a loved one with cancer with Avva's free apps.
