With a passion for healthcare, particularly working to support women, Ruth Kuguru spearheads APPIS, which is driving impact and accessibility in healthcare and shining a light on innovative work in the space
“When you touch a woman in health, you touch five.” That’s what Ruth Kuguru learned early on in her career—the importance of the role of women in health. “A woman takes care of her healthcare, she takes care of her children’s health. She’s probably the one making decisions for her partner’s health and her in-laws and her parents. So, when you work with women in health, you really are getting the biggest bang for your buck,” says Kuguru.
This is something that has steered Kuguru’s career trajectory to where she is now—working in communications and patient engagement at Novartis where she covers Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
“Health is foundational to life and it’s meaningful,” she says. “Working in healthcare, I’ve never had to ask, what’s the point of this? Because there’s no doubt that health matters.”
In her role at Novartis, Kuguru established and spearheads The Alliance and Partnership for Patient Innovation and Solutions (APPIS), which aims to bring together different voices from the health community to improve health understanding and outcomes and accelerate access to healthcare for patients.
APPIS, which was established in 2021, is supported by Novartis but co-created with patient leaders and advocates, and healthcare experts, and since its inception it has brought together more than 2000 people from 60 countries to drive patient innovation and solutions.
There are four main ways APPIS does this, beginning each year with the APPIS Summit in March, which brings together stakeholders with the common goal of improving access and outcomes for patients. Then there’s APPISx, a series of dialogues in the vein of TED talks, addressing key local issues to drive action. Last year, APPIS launched the APPIS Innovator Program, which aims to uncover the organisations doing incredible work in order to help them grow and scale for greater impact. And lastly, there’s the APPIS Resource Center, which offers white papers and workshop tools around three main themes—health literacy, digital communications and health policy shaping.
APPIS focuses on key disease areas, namely cardiovascular disease, the number one killer worldwide, and cancer, especially breast cancer, a cause particularly important to Kuguru.
In Asia, breast cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths for women. And globally, Asia accounts for 39 percent of all breast cancer. There’s a lot of work to be done in the area, yet a number of barriers exist, from knowing where to go for care, to understanding what it means to get an early diagnosis, to policy where, for example, decisions around treatments don’t give patients any say. Clarity on where to find credible, understandable information is also lacking.
One of APPIS’ partners in this field is one of the first winners of its APPIS Innovator Program. The ICanServe Foundation in the Philippines was founded in 1999 by four breast cancer survivors and works on early breast cancer detection programmes in local communities to provide diagnosis and timely treatment. It is the only comprehensive cancer control programme in the Philippines.
APPIS works with ICanServe Foundation on their Circle of Life programme, through which it aims to build the data and digital infrastructure around its breast cancer control programme. By doing this, it hopes to generate analytics that can help identify where issues lie in the patient journey and enhance monitoring and evaluation, thereby empowering the local government to make data-driven decisions and provide appropriate funding.
The other winner of the 2022 APPIS Innovator Program was Psoriasis Philippines, which helps people living with psoriasis access accurate, science-based information and advocates for their rights through a weekly online show. With the support of APPIS, it aims to broaden its coverage to tackle other diseases including cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Another early win for APPIS came out of APPISx in Taiwan, which brought together patient leaders from various patient groups for a workshop out of which a paper was published about the importance of patient voices in determining the medicines brought into the country. It is now feeding into the nation’s Health Technology Assessment process.
The second APPIS Innovator Program is currently underway and has seen even more entries this year compared to the inaugural year, as the initiative assesses how it can support, scale and grow more organisations that are doing great work to impact patients in communities, whether through funding, making connections, coaching or other means of support.
“One of the unexpected wins out of APPIS is that there’s incredible work going on here,” says Kuguru. “People in this space, whether patient leaders, organisations or influencers, are in it professionally but are driven for reasons that are pure, so for me, it’s been one of my personal goals to really shed a light on and partner with organisations doing incredible work who may not be known about in other parts of the world.”