AskEllyn is an AI companion built on the lived experience of Ellyn Winters-Robinson, a breast cancer survivor and author of Flat Please, Hold the Shame. Developed for Cigna Healthcare, AskEllyn provides multilingual, empathetic support to patients and families navigating breast cancer in over 100 countries and 50+ languages.
Most support resources are clinical, fragmented, and unavailable at 2am. AskEllyn is none of those things.
The Challenge
Breast cancer patients face an overwhelming amount of information at the moment they're least equipped to process it. The resources that exist are rarely warm, rarely accessible outside business hours, and rarely available in the patient's own language. Healthcare providers can't scale one-on-one emotional support to every person who needs it.
The gap isn't clinical. It's human. Patients need someone to talk to, not just a portal to navigate.
The Worker
AskEllyn isn't a medical tool. It's a companion. Built on Ellyn's personal journey through diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, the worker provides non-medical support with warmth, empathy, and the kind of understanding that only comes from lived experience.
- Conversational and multilingual: Available in 50+ languages, meeting patients wherever they are in the world and in whatever language feels most natural.
- Emotionally intelligent: Trained on real patient conversations and Ellyn's personal narrative, so responses reflect genuine understanding rather than clinical distance.
- Always available: 24/7 support that doesn't require an appointment, a referral, or a waitlist.
- Deployed by a major insurer: Live on Cigna Healthcare's breast cancer community as a trusted tool for digital patient engagement.
The Impact
Since launch, AskEllyn has supported users in over 100 countries and generated more than 100,000 conversations. The worker was invited to panel at a GE conference and passed through their quality control process, a meaningful milestone for AI in a healthcare context.
AskEllyn is also being studied as part of a Canadian Cancer Society-funded research project led by Brock University, exploring the role AI companions can play in supporting breast cancer patients and caregivers at scale.
AskEllyn represents what's possible when AI is grounded in real human experience rather than clinical data alone.
What's Next
AskEllyn continues to improve through real-world conversations. The model is being refined based on patient interactions, and new deployment channels are in development to reach more patients through the platforms they already use.
"We built AskEllyn for the moments when patients need support most and have nowhere to turn. That's the gap worth closing."
