Cancer survivors’ use of crowdfunding campaigns: AI-generated patterns of reported medical financial hardship and unmet social needs.

Abstract

542 Background: Cancer survivors and their families frequently experience medical financial hardship and may make trade-offs with other household economic needs to save money. Crowdfunding campaigns have become increasingly common for requesting financial support to cover expenses for medical treatments and daily living necessities. However, little is known about cancer survivors’ use of personal crowdfunding campaigns, including the amounts and types of financial support received. Methods: Ten thousand fundraiser stories related to cancer were randomly selected from 2022 GoFundMe using a distributed web scraper. Additional campaign information from publicly available GoFundMe webpages included organizer’s information, fundraising goal, amount of money raised, and donation records. A brief survey was designed and implemented with OpenAI, which analyzed each fundraiser story to extract cancer survivors’ sociodemographic characteristics, medical financial hardship, and unmet social needs. For each campaign, the fundraiser story and the corresponding survey were sent to GPT-3.5-Turbo model through the OpenAI’s application programming interface. Extracted information included beneficiary’s age, cancer site and stage, time since diagnosis, treatment status, employment status and work disruption due to cancer (ages ≥18 years), school absenteeism and parent’s work disruption (ages <18 years), lack of sick leave, income loss, struggles with expenses for medical treatments, housing, food, transportation, and monthly bills. Results: Among 10,000 cancer-related fundraiser stories, 3,275 specified age of the beneficiary with cancer (774 ages <18 years, 2,531 ages ≥18 years). Moreover, the most common cancer sites were breast (n=583), colon (n=223), and brain (n=169) in ages ≥18 years; leukemia (n= 217), brain (n= 139), and bone (n=52) in ages <18 years. Average amount raised was $10,205 (ages <18 years; median: $4,908, inter quantile range [IQR]: $1,692-$13,252) and $8,515 (ages ≥18 years; median: $3,684, inter quantile range [IQR]: $1,495-$9,258). Only 10.8% reached their fundraising goals. Among cancer survivors aged <18 years, 26.6% experienced school absenteeism and 8.8% described parental work disruptions. Among survivors aged ≥18 years, frequently listed reasons for financial support needs include work disruption (51.4%) and income loss (37.1%), lack of sick leave (33.3%), and struggles with expenses for medical treatments (94.0%) and for housing, food, transportation, and monthly bills (22.6%). Conclusions: Cancer-related crowdfunding campaigns are used to pay for medical and other basic household expenses, underscoring the fragility of safety nets in the US. Examination of fundraising stories can provide important insights to the types of financial hardship experienced by cancer survivors and inform future interventions.