Healthcare Marketing Impact Awards - 2024

Campaign: Magnetic Stories
Agency/Firm: Area 23, an IPG Health Company
Client: Siemens Healthineers 

MRIs can be scary and uncomfortable for anyone, especially children undergoing cancer treatment. The process of coaxing kids into getting these scans, which can produce sounds as loud as military jets, is hard on medical staff and even harder on the patient — children are sometimes put under anesthesia just to get through it.

Siemens Healthineers, an MRI manufacturer, saw the problem and thought there had to be a way to make these scans less stressful for children. What resulted was “Magnetic Stories,” a groundbreaking way to change the way patients experienced these machines through the creative use of data.

What Siemens Healthineers did, in partnership with IPG Health agency Area 23 and publishing house LeYa, is take the most common MRI sequences and transform their loud and unsettling audio data into enchanting children’s audiobooks. The stories are ones children look forward to returning to, which is critical given some young patients have to get these scans done as routinely as every two months.

“Magnetic Stories” launched at CUF, a hospital network in Portugal, and it will expand to Spain.

The project demonstrated how a healthcare company can effectively use data to change an intimidating experience for a patient into a positive one.