Cancer treatment is overwhelming. Blood tests come back full of confusing numbers. Patients go home not knowing what any of it means, what to eat, how much to drink, or why they feel the way they do. We built a feature that changes that — turning lab reports into clear, personal guidance that helps patients prepare for every chemotherapy session.
India sees over 1.4 million new cancer cases every year. Most patients are diagnosed late — at Stage III or IV, when treatment is at its hardest. They travel long distances to reach a specialist. They sit through chemotherapy. And then they go home with a printed lab report full of medical numbers — and no one to help them make sense of it.
The gap between appointments is where patients struggle most. No guidance. No monitoring. No one to tell them what's low in their blood, what to eat to fix it, or when a symptom is worth calling about. This is the gap we were asked to design for.
Patients go home after a chemo session with a blood report, a lot of anxiety, and almost no guidance on what to do. Here's what we found was actually happening.
CBC, ANC, ALT, creatinine — the report is a wall of medical terms and numbers. Doctors try to explain, but consultations are short. Most patients forget what was said within a day. Nothing is written down in plain language they can actually use.
One patient's haemoglobin crashes in Cycle 3. Another's neutrophils drop in Cycle 2. A third develops fatigue from low iron despite normal haemoglobin. The symptoms are different. The causes are different. Generic advice like "eat well and rest" helps nobody.
If your haemoglobin is low, eating spinach with lemon at meals makes a measurable difference. If your neutrophils are low, there are specific foods to eat, hygiene steps to take, and things to avoid. But patients are sent home with no food-specific, number-specific guidance. They're left to guess.
By the third cycle, patients are exhausted. Managing nausea, fatigue, medications, and appointments is already too much. Remembering to drink enough water or track what they eat gets dropped entirely. Not because they don't care — because there's simply nothing left.
What we kept hearing in interviews: "The doctor tells me something is low and says eat better. I go home and I don't know if low means dangerous or just low. I cook the same things and hope the next test is better."
18 interviews with patients, family members, and oncology nurses at Everhope's centres in Gurugram. We sat in consultations, read 200+ real lab reports, and ran three rounds of testing with actual patients. Here's what we found.
Fatigue, mouth sores, unusual bruising — patients write these off as "normal side effects." But each symptom is often a sign of a specific low value in their blood. Connecting the symptom to the number, in plain language, was the missing link. Once patients understood why they felt what they felt, they were far more likely to act on guidance.
In almost every home we visited, the patient didn't cook their own meals or manage their own medications — a spouse, son, or daughter did. If the guidance was only useful to the patient, it would mostly go unused. The family member needed to understand it too, get it on their phone, and know what to cook for dinner.
Patients photograph their report and send it to anyone they know with a medical background. They get answers that are incomplete, alarming, or just wrong. The anxiety of not knowing is often worse than a bad result. People needed a source they could actually trust — not a panicked group chat at midnight.
Most of our users are 45–70 years old, have moderate smartphone experience, and are opening this app while feeling sick or scared. A feature with more than 3 taps to reach an answer, or that used medical jargon without explaining it, would simply not be used. Radical simplicity wasn't a design preference — it was the only viable approach.
The single biggest flaw in generic health apps is that they treat all cancer patients the same. They don't. Different blood values drop at different times for different people on different treatments. Our AI reads each patient's specific numbers and gives guidance that's relevant to them — not to some average patient.
Common during chemo. Patients often blame tiredness on "the treatment" without knowing it's tied to a specific number they can actually improve. Eating iron-rich foods with vitamin C, avoiding tea at meals, and resting properly makes a measurable difference in the days before the next session.
This is the most common reason chemo sessions get delayed in India. Low neutrophils mean the body can't fight infections well. Most patients don't know this — they continue eating raw food and going to crowded places. A specific checklist of hygiene steps, food to eat, and things to avoid changes the outcome.
Patients often don't feel low platelets until something unexpected happens. They need to know to avoid certain medications, watch for bruising, and be careful with physical activity. This guidance is specific, time-sensitive, and almost never communicated at discharge.
Chemo makes drinking feel difficult. Nausea, fatigue, and the general exhaustion of treatment mean most patients drink far less than they should. Dehydration then amplifies every other side effect. A simple daily water tracker with push reminders is low-tech and genuinely changes behaviour.
The best design decisions get made before opening a design tool. These six principles were our shared agreement throughout the project. Every screen was measured against them.
A patient opening their lab report is already anxious. Every screen should lower that anxiety, not raise it. No medical term appears without an immediate plain-language explanation. Colour signals are used to inform, not to frighten. Red is reserved only for values that truly need urgent action.
Never lead with data before the patient understands what it means. The AI summary always appears before the list of values. When people read context first, they understand the numbers better and panic less. This one change was the biggest improvement we made in testing.
"Eat nutritiously" helps nobody. "Have spinach with a squeeze of lemon at lunch — vitamin C helps your body absorb iron" is something a person can actually do today. Every piece of guidance must be concrete, Indian-household-friendly, and appropriate for someone on active cancer treatment.
In most Indian homes, it's a family member who cooks, manages medicines, and keeps track of everything. If this person can't access and understand the guidance, nothing gets implemented. Every screen must be readable on a shared phone and shareable via WhatsApp in one tap.
This feature explains and guides — it never diagnoses. If blood values are dangerously low, the screen shows nothing but a clear message to call the Everhope care team immediately. No tips, no remedies, just: call now. This boundary was agreed with our clinical team from day one.
Showing a patient their haemoglobin is 8.9 is a data point. Showing them it improved from 8.2 in Cycle 1 to 9.8 in Cycle 3 — because of the changes they made — is motivation. Tracking improvement over the full course of treatment is what turns this from a tool into a companion.
Good design is a series of deliberate decisions. Here are the six that mattered most — what we chose, why, and what it changed.
Early versions showed the list of blood values first. In testing, patients saw one red value and panicked before reading anything else. We flipped it: the summary comes first, always. When patients read context before data, they understood better and were much less anxious. This one reorder was the most impactful single change in the whole project.
We nearly launched with just two colours. A clinical advisor pointed out that values getting close to dangerous — but not yet there — needed their own signal. Adding an amber "Watch" state stopped patients from treating every session as a crisis, and made "Red" genuinely alarming when it appeared. Caregivers in testing said this was the most helpful change we made.
Generic health apps say "eat more iron" for low haemoglobin. But a patient undergoing chemotherapy might have mouth sores that make chewing painful, or nausea that makes eating nearly impossible. Every recommendation in this feature was co-developed with Everhope's oncology nutritionists and validated against the most common treatment types and side-effect profiles.
Research showed that in most Indian homes, the family member does the cooking, manages medicines, and takes notes at appointments. If the guidance only reached the patient, very little of it would get implemented. We put a persistent Share button on every report and guidance screen. Post-launch: 62% of users shared a screen with a family member within 24 hours.
We considered building a detailed daily health log. We built a water tracker instead. Dehydration was the single most neglected and most impactful behaviour we found in our research. The drop visualisation and push reminders required no explanation, worked on any phone, and took one second to use. 71% of users set a hydration reminder in their first two weeks.
If neutrophils or platelets drop to a dangerous level, the entire Lab Summary screen is replaced with one clear message: call Everhope immediately. No AI tips. No remedies. Just a single action. This was non-negotiable from our clinical team — and it was the decision that earned their trust to build this feature in the first place.
Data from in-app analytics, post-session patient surveys (312 responses), a comparison of chemo postponement rates between users and non-users at Everhope's Gurugram centres, and a follow-up usability study with 14 patients across multiple treatment cycles.
"My husband's haemoglobin kept dropping before every session and we didn't know what to do. The app showed me exactly what to cook. His third-cycle count was the best it had been in months. The doctor actually asked us what had changed."
"I used to dread looking at the report. Now I open the app first, read the summary, and I actually understand what's going on. Just knowing — without having to Google it or call someone at midnight — makes everything less frightening."
Most apps are designed for a calm, curious user. But someone opening a cancer blood report is likely scared, tired, and possibly in physical discomfort. That changes everything — the words you use, the order you show information, the colours on screen. I now think about a user's emotional state at the moment they open the app as seriously as I think about their device or screen size.
We brought Everhope's clinical team in during the research phase. This saved us from building things that looked right but weren't — like recommending foods that are actually problematic during certain treatments, or using exercise guidance that ignores how extreme fatigue can get. Clinical input early isn't a bottleneck. It's what makes the product worth trusting.
In most Indian households, it's a family member — not the patient — who manages the meals, tracks medications, and comes to appointments. We nearly missed this entirely. Once we understood it, everything changed: every screen became something a family member needed to understand, every recommendation became something the person doing the cooking needed to act on. Designing for the household, not the individual, was the biggest shift in our thinking.
We spent months making the AI summaries accurate and clear. But in testing, patients would read a perfect summary and immediately ask: "has a real doctor seen this?" The answer was to keep the doctor's note visible on every screen, not buried in a separate section. When the AI said something and the patient could see their own doctor saying something similar two cards below, trust followed immediately. The AI doesn't replace the clinician. It extends them.
Cancer treatment is months of connected cycles, not isolated appointments. The most meaningful thing this feature can do is show a patient their haemoglobin improving from 8.2 in Cycle 1 to 9.8 in Cycle 3 — and connect that progress to the changes they made. I'd build that longitudinal view much earlier in v2. It's not a feature to add later. It's the whole story.
We proved that patients act on guidance when it's clear, specific, and trusted. The next phase takes that foundation and makes the experience proactive — anticipating problems before they become delays.