Hear2Care was founded in September 2023, and received 501(c)3 designation from IRS in January 2024. We became advocates for immigrants’ healthcare rights from the get-go, as active participants in NCI workshops on cancer disparity. Our founder, Dr. Tingting Zhang, was invited as a panelist to participate in the President’s Cancer Panel meeting taking place on Nov 2 – 3 2023. This was the second meeting of a series – Reducing Cancer Care Inequities: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Patient Navigation and focused on Technology Opportunities for Patient Navigation.
The report from this series of discussions was released in November 2024: https://prescancerpanel.cancer.gov/reports-meetings/enhancing-patient-navigation-2024
During our strategic planning, we uncovered a serious issue with cancer mortality data in the US for oversea death reporting that disproportionally affects immigrants. We presented at NCI’s ASGCR and at ASCO, with our abstracts published on both Journal of Clinical Oncology and JCO Global Oncology.
We also were interviewed by OncoDaily at ASCO annual meeting 2024 to raise the awareness of the missing death data issue in immigrant rich populations. And our poster at ASCO Breakthrough was selected as a top poster in August 2024.
We were also interviewed by the Chinese online media eChinaHealth at the ASCO Breakthrough poster session.
Our manuscript preprint, in collaboration with the Colangiocarcinoma Foundation and Hope for Stomach Cancer, has been release on MedRxiv https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.22.25320955v1
Hear2Care also participate in the Annual Conference for the Coalition of Community-based Heritage Language Schools and our call for collaboration was featured in its October newsletter.
We have identified patient and caregiver empowerment in prevention and supportive/palliative care, especially in liver cancer, gastric cancer, lung cancer, and cervical cancer, as our initial focuses. We were invited by NCI epidemiologists to participate in Stanford Gastric Cancer Summit 2024 hosted by Stanford CARE.
And Dr Zhang was invited to present patients’ perspective at the International Liver Cancer Movement’s satellite meeting at the annual Liver Meeting in November.
Dr Zhang was subsequently featured as the keynote speaker in December 2024 at the Global Liver Council meeting hosted by the Global Liver Institute and spoke at the inaugural transcultural oncology webinar series hosted by the African Diaspora Cancer Network in February 2025.
Patient education audios we produced in Mandarin Chinese have been release on Spotify podcasts, Apple podcasts, and music platforms. We are working with oncologists, palliative care specialists, disease/community specific advocacy groups to produce them in other languages including Cantonese, Korean, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and other languages and dialects.
We want to thank our donors through their corporate-matching programs on Benevity, and we look forward to working with many more partners to create valuable resources to break language barriers for immigrants!
