Crowdfunding campaigns and cancer survivorship: A comprehensive overview of GoFundMe in the US in the last decade.
541 Background: Cancer is a life-threatening disease and often associated high out-of-pocket (OOP) costs. Cancer patients may forgo or delay medical care because of costs and struggle to afford other basic needs in the US. Crowdfunding can help people cover OOP costs and daily living expenses, such as food, housing, and transportation. GoFundMe is one of the most utilized crowdfunding platforms for personal medical reasons in the last decade. However, little is known about the money raised on GoFundMe and the relative portion of cancer-related campaigns. Methods: The 2012-2022 crowdfunding campaigns were collected from the GoFundMe website using a distributed web scraper. The downloaded data was parsed to extract campaign details such as category, organizer information, fundraiser story, fundraising goal, amount of money raised, and donation records. Preprocessing steps were applied to remove duplicate records or invalid entries. Offline donations were excluded from analyses due to the