Simplifying the Search for Assistance with FundFinder

While charitable foundations provide a critical safety net, we often hear from patients and their healthcare teams that the road to financial assistance is difficult to navigate.

Until recently, people looking for charitable assistance had to manually monitor the status of disease funds across multiple organizations to find an available program. This placed an additional burden on patients, their families, providers and pharmacists.

Streamlining the Search for Patient Assistance

To ease this burden, we spent 2018 developing FundFinder, a web-based app that is designed to help underinsured and economically vulnerable patients quickly find financial assistance from PAN and seven other charitable foundations.

FundFinder simplifies the search for financial assistance by instantly notifying users when the funding they need becomes available. It’s also the first free app of its kind to serve the general public.

In addition to providing information on available patient assistance from the PAN Foundation, FundFinder tracks program availability from seven other charitable foundations: CancerCare, Good Days, HealthWell, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Patient Advocate Foundation, Patient Services, Inc. and The Assistance Fund.

On the day FundFinder launched, over 1,200 users signed up for the app—demonstrating the demand for a tool of this kind.

Signing up for Real-Time Alerts

After creating an account, users can subscribe to email or text message notifications and select specific disease funds to follow. When a followed fund opens, users receive an alert indicating which foundation has available funding. The app is updated hourly, and users can access the free app from any web browser, tablet or smartphone by visiting fundfinder.panfoundation.org.

Since its launch in December 2018 into the first quarter of 2019, FundFinder sent 25,847 email and 8,808 text message alerts of available patient assistance to over 7,500 users.

At PAN, our daily work is devoted to ensuring that we can offer some form of support to all who come to us for assistance—whether through a PAN grant or referral to another organization that may be able to help. For our team, FundFinder is a vital part of our mission, allowing us to make strides toward our vision of a nation where everyone can access the healthcare they need.

We’re committed to developing new resources to streamline the workflow of healthcare providers and pharmacists so that they can more efficiently connect their patients with the care they need. Most importantly, we’re humbled to help patients simplify their own search for financial assistance so that they can worry less about the cost of treatment and focus more on improving their health and well-being.