Medical financial hardships shared in cancer-linked crowdfunding stories

A considerable proportion of cancer-related crowdfunding stories share experiences of medical financial hardships and health-related social needs (HRSNs), according to a research letter published online Oct. 10 in JAMA Oncology.

Zhiyuan Zheng, Ph.D., from the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, and colleagues used a large natural language processing (NLP) model to examine unmet medical and social needs based on cancer-related fundraising stories extracted from the GoFundMe website from Jan. 1, 2021, to May 23, 2023.

A total of 91,113 cancer-related crowdfunding campaigns were identified and 24,002,700 words from their stories were analyzed. The researchers found that the proportions with NLP outputs for individual campaign characteristics were 19.6, 61.1, 5.1, 18.3, and 20.6 percent for age, sex, marital status, health insurance, and employment status, respectively.

Most of the campaigns had NLP outputs for cancer type and treatments (79.0 and 52.6 percent, respectively). Of all the fundraising stories, 25.5 and 24.1 percent, respectively, had NLP outputs for medical financial hardship and HRSNs, including employment or school disruptions; loss of income; or struggles with food, housing, transportation expenses, and monthly bills.

Most fundraisers received some funds (99.5 percent), but few achieved their goals (11.4 percent). Manual checking of a sample of 50 fundraising stories showed accuracy of 95.7 percent within the NLP model.

“The study findings suggest that more than one-third of cancer-related crowdfunding campaigns explicitly mentioned medical financial hardship or HRSNs, underscoring the fragility of safety nets in the U.S.,” the authors write.

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