Make The World Better: Heal Mary

When it comes to illnesses such as cancer, clinical trials can be helpful in achieving the best possible health outcome. However, finding information about clinical trial options can be difficult and stressful. 

Heal Mary makes this process easier by connecting patients, caregivers, and doctors with data on clinical trials that are happening worldwide. We chatted with Founder Cassandra Hui about Heal Mary’s history, mission, and goals, and what makes this company unique.

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Tell us about Heal Mary’s mission. 

Heal Mary’s mission is to make clinical trials accessible to people of all backgrounds by easing the burden on the search and enrollment process. We’re focused on empowering patients. 

What inspired your founders to start Heal Mary? 

My sisters were both diagnosed with cancer in 2017. Our mom was already a Stage 4 cancer survivor. I decided at that point to move my career from technology to digital health.  

What were some of the challenges you encountered? 

I think the biggest hurdle was trying to understand how clinical trials and enrollment functions behind the scenes. We had to bring on several advisors in the space to really get to know the problem we were solving.

In April 2020, we pivoted to help with COVID-19, and everything we thought we knew changed overnight. And so, we had to be incredibly agile in both spaces to address the impact the disease was having to the existing clinical trial industry and to the new state of the industry. 

What do you consider Heal Mary’s biggest success? 

Our biggest success is really what we’ve done in the past 12 months after pivoting our business, from the life science team we’ve brought on – who have done everything to help out, from translating medical terms to plain language and digital patient outreach – to our technical team who spent countless hours building out the functionality and technical process for the patient experience.

 Our community really came together to help us out in an effort to help more patients. 

What makes your organization unique? 

Our diversity. The rich experiences of our team members who have had training or education in places like the US, Africa, Scotland, and Hong Kong, and in industries like Pharma, Digital Health, AI, and Telecommunications. 

The lens in which we operate internally is how we feel best serves a diverse patient population as well. 

How do you feel Heal Mary makes the world better?

We are passionate about patients and their ability to know their options. We feel we make the world better by making it easier for patients to access those options. 

Tell us about your organization’s goals. 

We have several technology and investment goals in the next year that will get us to a place to serve more patients and increase access to trial information. 

What’s probably more compelling are our goals for 2021/2022 that tie into our UN SDG objectives:

• Good Health and Well-Being: 100% increase in matching patients to clinical trials.
• Gender Equality: 40-50% of potential participants in any trial from Heal Mary are female.
• Reduced Inequality: 25-30% of potential participants in any trial from Heal Mary are BIPOC.

Are there any upcoming initiatives or projects you’d like to share? 

Currently, users of our platform can get matched with individual trials based on acceptance criteria. Our next technology implementation will help patients match with multiple trials, and they will only need to fill out the acceptance criteria once.

What do you most want people to know about Heal Mary? 

We want patients and caregivers to know that they’re not alone. Most of us have been there. This is our passion.

How can people help or contribute to Heal Mary’s mission?

Help us share the word with people who you think could use our platform or services. We want to work with patients to create the best patient-empowered platform.

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This story was featured in the Make The World Better magazine: