Your cancer diagnosis should not depend on which island you live on. On July 17, at the Hilton Trinidad, we are going to prove it does not have to.
The Conference
The CAOH 2026 Annual Scientific Conference convenes July 17-19 at the Hilton Trinidad & Conference Centre in Port of Spain. The theme is “The Next Decade of Cancer Care: Collaboration for Regional Impact.” The Caribbean Association of Oncology and Hematology has held this conference for over a decade, assembling oncologists, haematologists, public health leaders, and cancer society advocates from across the region. This year, CaribChat will be there.
CaribChat is governed Caribbean cancer navigation. It is the same conversation engine that powers MammoChat for breast health in the United States, localized for Caribbean populations, guidelines, resource availability, and healing traditions. When a patient in Port of Spain asks where to get screened, CaribChat returns the TT Cancer Society mobile units, Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, and the private radiology clinics in Westmoorings. When a grandmother in Kingston asks whether soursop tea is safe during chemotherapy, CaribChat acknowledges the tradition, cites the in vitro evidence for acetogenins, flags the documented herb-drug interactions with taxanes and platinum agents, and says what it always says: tell your oncologist.
Every claim is sourced. Every facility is geographically verified. Every tradition is respected.
The Problem
Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among Caribbean women. CARPHA surveillance data shows mortality rates between 14% and 30% across the region. In Trinidad and Tobago, the public sector mammography rate is 0.19 per 10,000 women over 40, according to a 2017 Springer situational analysis. Private facilities in St. Clair and Westmoorings offer same-day mammography, but the cost runs $500-800 TT. The TT Cancer Society sends mobile units across the island for free community screening, but scheduling depends on knowing they exist.
The gap is not just infrastructure. It is navigation. A patient diagnosed in San Fernando needs to know that radiation therapy is available at Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex in Mt. Hope, that Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation is the only radiation facility in all of Guyana, that Cornwall Regional Hospital serves western Jamaica from Montego Bay. This information exists, scattered across ministry websites, cancer society brochures, and the institutional memory of clinicians who have practiced in the region for decades. What does not exist is a single governed surface that sources it, verifies it, and makes it available to anyone who asks.
That is what CaribChat is.
The Evidence
CaribChat draws from ten governed evidence layers. CAOH conference proceedings and regional clinical standards provide the oncology foundation. CARPHA cancer surveillance data, sourced from seven national registries across the Caribbean, provides the epidemiological ground truth. The NCCN Resource Stratification Framework adapts US clinical guidelines for resource-constrained settings, and CaribChat applies that adaptation layer for Caribbean nations specifically. ClinicalTrials.gov provides live matching for trials with Caribbean sites, because clinical research should not be something that only happens in Houston and New York. The TT Cancer Society, PAHO/WHO, and IAEA breast cancer programs round out the institutional evidence base.
Fifteen screening facilities across eight Caribbean countries are geographically verified in the system, each tagged by type (hospital, clinic, mobile unit), sector (public, private, NGO), and location. Five Caribbean healing traditions (bush medicine, faith and prayer circles, dietary traditions, community caregiving, and spiritual healing) are evidence-tagged with their clinical status, because dismissing a grandmother’s soursop tea without context is not evidence-based medicine; it is arrogance.
The Architecture
CaribChat runs on the CANONIC governance framework, the same 255-bit compliance standard that governs every service in the Hadley Lab portfolio. Every conversation turn is recorded on an append-only ledger. Every clinical claim traces to a governed source. The system cannot diagnose, cannot prescribe, and cannot present US-only guidelines without Caribbean resource stratification context. These are not aspirational guidelines; they are structural constraints enforced by the architecture itself.
The community learning model is the distinctive innovation. Every question a patient or clinician asks becomes part of the community’s compounding intelligence. A caregiver in Toco asks where to get screened; the answer joins the ledger and surfaces for the next person who asks a similar question. A clinician in Kingston queries prostate cancer prevalence in Jamaica; the CARPHA registry data is cited, and the pattern is captured. The AI in caribchat.ai is not artificial intelligence in the conventional sense. It is community intelligence: the accumulated, anonymized, governed learning patterns from Caribbean cancer patients, caregivers, and clinicians.
Fifty-four real user sessions have been ledgered since March 2, 2026. These are not synthetic test cases; they are real questions from real people navigating cancer care in the Caribbean.
The Community
CaribChat is not a US technology company parachuting into the Caribbean. It is built with the institutions that serve the region. Marisa Nimrod, MD, MPH, a physician in Trinidad and Tobago and CEO of CAOH who is building a breast cancer navigation app for Caribbean patients, brings institutional relationships across the Caribbean oncology network. Allana Roach leads the CANONIC ethics board with a community health background that grounds every deployment decision in local governance. The Ministry of Health in Trinidad and Tobago, the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, and the TT Cancer Society are all part of the institutional fabric that CaribChat serves.
The Caribbean already has a community care model that works. Shared transport to chemotherapy appointments, faith meal trains from church and mosque communities, lime support circles where peer navigation happens naturally, childcare rotation among neighbors and church sisters during treatment cycles. The psycho-oncology literature validates what Caribbean communities have practiced for generations: strong social networks reduce cancer mortality. CaribChat does not replace this model. It connects patients to it, maps it, and makes it visible.
The Launch
Registration for the CAOH 2026 Annual Scientific Conference is open at caohcaribbean.org. Early Bird pricing is available: $315 USD for member physicians, $225 USD for advocates and students. The conference includes three days of sessions, AACME-accredited continuing medical education, and the networking that makes Caribbean oncology collaboration possible.
CaribChat will be live at carib.chat. The marketing surface is at caribchat.ai. The full governance contract is public, because accountability that is not auditable is not accountability.
Free for the community. Free forever. Screening navigation, cancer guidelines, healing tradition evidence, community care connections. Facility-level analytics and institutional dashboards require credits. Caribbean health ministries, cancer societies, and public hospitals receive enterprise capabilities at zero cost through the Foundation tier, because the institutions that serve the most vulnerable should not have to pay for the tools to do it.
We will see you at the Hilton Trinidad on July 17.
Sources
| Source | Reference |
|---|---|
| CAOH | caohcaribbean.org — Caribbean Association of Oncology and Hematology |
| CAOH Conference | caohcaribbean.org/conference/ — July 17-19 2026, Hilton Trinidad, Port of Spain |
| CARPHA | carpha.org — Caribbean Public Health Agency, Port of Spain |
| TT Cancer Society | cancertt.com — 69 Dundonald St, Port of Spain; +1 (868) 226-1221 |
| MOH T&T | health.gov.tt — Ministry of Health, Trinidad and Tobago |
| NCCN | nccn.org — Resource Stratification Framework |
| ClinicalTrials.gov | clinicaltrials.gov — Caribbean-site trial matching |
| PAHO/WHO | paho.org — Caribbean subregion |
| IAEA | iaea.org — Breast cancer screening programs |
| CaribChat | caribchat.ai (marketing) / carib.chat (chatbot) |
| MammoChat | mammochat.com — US breast health |
| CANONIC | canonic.org — Governance framework |
| Hadley Lab | hadleylab.org — Clinical informatics |
| Mammography rate | Springer 2017 Situational Analysis, Trinidad & Tobago |
| CARPHA mortality | Cancer Incidence in the Caribbean, Vol. I — 7 national registries |
| *BLOG | CARIBCHAT AT CAOH | 2026-03-15* |