Health/Cancer

Health

At the center of all our programs is the notion that the end goal is the improvement of the overall health of the individual and the community. Therefore, we are always exploring new ideas and methodology to improve contemporary understanding of health and wellness.

Cancer Research and Program:

Illumination is interested in the entire  cancer process of care. Therefore, we are involved in many projects with hospitals, academic institutions, and local organizations such as University of California, Irvine, University of Southern California, Children Hospital of Orange County, Children Hospital of Los Angeles, and Cancer Kinship.

Pediatric Oncology and Process of Care:

We are currently developing a community linkage mobile application to address the logistic needs of physicians and families of children with cancer. This is a collaboration between Illumination Institute, CHOC, USC, and UCI. The goal of our project is to link family to existing resources within Orange County in order to improve cancer outcomes. There are many services and programs for these families within OC, but they do not know about it due to socioeconomic barriers and health and English literacy.

Breast Cancer:

Due to current understanding of the healthy immigrant effect and cancer registry data, there are unidentified social and cultural factors within the Vietnamese American enclave which are positively impacting Vietnamese American women with breast cancer survival rate. We want to investigate and identify these factors so that we can translate our findings to other communities to better detect and improval breast cancer survival rate. The results of this research could be applicable to other types of cancer. The novel findings thus far is low SES Vietnamese women living in an enclave has better breast cancer survival rate than non-hispanice White and Vietnamese women (usually of higher SES) living outside of an enclave. This work is a collaboration with the University of Southern California Keck’s School of Medicine.