Rural challenges in a decade of crowdfunding for cancer care.
e14013 Background: Improving access and affordability to oncology care for patients in rural America is a national imperative given growing health disparities in cancer morbidity and mortality. Crowdfunding has emerged as a rescue tool for cancer patients facing difficulties paying for treatment costs. While such platforms present opportunities to increase access, patients who live in rural areas face increased challenges compared to those in urban areas. Methods: We crawled the pages of GoFundMe fundraising campaigns from 2010 – 2020 using a custom Python script. We then indexed these pages for campaigns focused on cancer treatment in the US and identified variables of interest using text analysis, including cancer type, demographics, clinical characteristics, and social network features, resulting in 151,051 campaigns. Rural status was identified by analyzing zip codes against the database provided by the US Census. Descriptive statistics, χ2, and t-tests were used to compare variables by rural status using R 3.6.3 software. Results: The 10 most prevalent types of cancer in our data were metastatic (26.8%), breast (17.0%), lung (12.4%), colorectal (6.6%), brain (6.3%), liver (4.2%), leukemia (3.2%), stomach (2.7%), pancreas (2.6%), and bone (2.1%). We found a statically significant difference between urban and rural areas in key variables including unemployment rate, insurance status, metastatic cancer rate, treatment type, social network reach, and fundraising totals. Conclusions: Since the 2011 launch of (ASCO) task force for improving cancer care of rural patients, a tremendous effort has been directed towards that. In our study of 151,051 patients over a 10-year period, we found that disparities between rural and urban America in cancer are not just limited to clinical management, but also in an era of crowdfunding, rural patients are still struggling to get the attention they need. We must increase efforts to raise awareness and find solutions to improve access to cancer care. [Table: see text]