(Editor’s Note: due to circumstances beyond our control, we were unable to award a Junkie for the month of April. As such, this award announcement covers both April and May of 2011. We don’t expect to miss another month again.)
Though progress has certainly been made over the course of the past decade, there is no denying that breast cancer continues to be one of the most severe medical threats in this country. Statistics reveal that one out of every 8 U.S. women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime and last year alone, more than 200,000 women were diagnosed with the disease. Factoring in the reality that our country’s broken health care system makes it difficult, and at times impossible, for breast cancer patients to afford the care they need magnifies the problem even further.
One e-commerce company has stepped into with a commitment to help.
As we originally reported back in May, home health and medical supply company Someone With started SomeoneWith.com to provide breast cancer survivors and patients with resources to help them cope with the disease and ease the financial burden of treatment.
The site is the creation of entrepreneur and e-commerce specialist Paula Jagemann, founder of both Online Office supplies and eCommerce Industries. In launching SomeoneWith, she wanted to give breast cancer patients the same benefits of advances in at-home shopping over the past decade that everyone else enjoys.
“I launched Someone With to drastically reduce the unnecessary hours women spend searching for obscure items, improve their overall experience by connecting them with guidance from other survivors and experts and help offset some of overwhelming financial burden associated with breast cancer disease management,” Jagemann said. “It’s all about giving time back to women with cancer, and providing unique financial solutions to help them pay for this unwanted journey.”
In addition to centralizing research information on treatments for patients, SomeoneWith.com removes geographic boundaries and allows patients to buy all of the supplies and medication they need in one place. By providing product reviews on medications and aggregating products based on disease stages, SomeoneWith drastically reduces the time a patient needs to spend researching and buying treatments from hours down to about 30 minutes.
The site also features a patent-pending registry service where a patient’s friends and family can make financial contributions to help alleviate treatment costs that can be as much as $30,000 in some cases. Someone With has a Facebok community of more than 6,700 people already as well.
We were very impressed with the network that SomeoneWith has built when we first wrote about them. It’s clear that the site is offering real value to people who truly need it. And as a result, we’re proud to recognize SomeoneWith.com as our latest Junkie Award winner. Congratulations to Paula Jagemann and her team for some truly outstanding work!
