OncoHealth

Providing access to holistic cancer care, by connecting patients with medical experts, specialists, and mentors.

Problem

Cancer, its symptoms, and challenges don’t just exist during scheduled healthcare appointments. How can we better serve people affected by cancer between appointments and after-hours, to reduce ED visits, hospitalizations, and inflated health care costs?

Objective

Create a digital health solution that helps bridge the access gap by providing 24/7 support for physical symptom management, mental health concerns, nutrition, and other challenges brought on by the cancer experience.

Key Results

During Pilot Phase: 

   • 43% of members engaged with the Clinical team
   • Members averaged 2.3 interactions per month
   • 68% used the health tracker & personalized recommendations 

Launched in partnership with 3 of the nation’s leading health plans, insuring over 5M members 

2023 eHealthcare award winner,
Best Overall Digital Patient Experience

Phase 1: Research, Product Definition, and Foundational Design

Research

Our work began with a phase of immersive research sessions with cancer patients and their friends, family, and caregivers, to:

1. More fully understand the health care experiences of people affected by cancer.

2. Identify potential opportunity areas and form some initial hypotheses around how our service could be most helpful.

These sessions were imperative for identifying the most impactful ways Iris could work towards closing this crucial gap.

They helped us to validate our hypotheses, to translate opportunity areas into potential hero feature sets, and to identify which feature sets would be most valuable for an MVP experience.

Product Definition and Feature Sets

We defined four distinct services that Iris could provide, to best support patients and caregivers. These experiences would form the core of the app:

Talking with an oncology-certified health care practitioner

Meeting with a licenced mental health therapist

Connecting with a network of peer mentors

Tracking personal health and monitoring symptoms

Foundational Design Language System

Working with OncoHealth’s internal marketing team, we took the existing brand guidelines and expanded them to set the vision for the digital brand expression, and build a foundational design language system with explicit emphasis on usability and accessibility.

Feature Refinement

Before jumping into Design and Development sprints in the second phase of our work, we held an additional research sprint for user-testing our 4 hero feature sets and their step-by-step workflows, to fine tune details:

Phase 2: Design and Development

Sprints

Working rapidly, individual feature sets were finalized across 2-week design sprints where iOS designs were explored internally, shared with the client for review and approval, and shared with the engineering team for alignment.

At the end of each sprint, design specs were handed off to engineers who worked in parallel streams to build and test.

Phase 2 spanned a total of 6 active design sprints + 4 passive sprints of support and QA.

Production

Once we moved full-steam ahead into production we were able to expand our foundational DLS to robust design system.

Applying our design system to the identified services and feature sets, we were able to quickly produce detailed design artifacts and screens for all workflows and moments within the app.

Owned Journeys:

Account Creation, Onboarding, and Log In:

In-App Messaging:

Peer Mentor Matching:

Appointment Scheduling:

Impact

The Iris app is available today via iOS and Android, at no additional costs to patients of participating health plans.

With approximately 70% of US citizens—that’s 32M people—living in counties without licensed oncologists, it’s incredibly important for patients with cancer to have this tool at their fingertips, providing access to holistic cancer care.

© 2025 Kristina Pedicone