Going into an MRI machine can be a nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing event for an adult, so it’s understandable that that fear and uncertainty would be compounded many times over for a child, who likely understands even less about the process.
That was the starting sentiment behind “Magnetic Stories,” a campaign launched by Siemens Healthineers that earlier this month won the top prize in the pharma division of the annual Cannes Lions awards.
The project weaves the loud, sometimes jarring sounds of an MRI machine into whimsical audio stories for kids to listen to during scans. Throughout the stories, various sounds are recast as robots, trains and spaceships, synced perfectly to the predictable patterns of a range of common scan types.
Magnetic Stories kicked off in a pilot launch at CUF, the largest private hospital group in Portugal. It’s now in the process of being expanded first into other scan types and languages, before ultimately being introduced into new geographies, according to Sourabh Pagaria, managing director of the Southern Europe region for Siemens Healthineers.
In an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing, Pagaria said that while the team was “super excited” to receive the Pharma Grand Prix at the Cannes festival, “it was not about winning this award.”
“We never started this project for that. We actually started this project to truly help these kids,” he said. “So, I think, for the team, it was a nice surprise, but that’s not what they work for. For them, the real excitement was when we had the first patient who went through that scan and heard that story and came out more excited than others who did not.”
The Magnetic Stories initiative followed a handful of other projects that Siemens Healthineers had previously introduced to help children feel more comfortable with MRI scans, including adding more welcoming lighting and graphics to pediatric scanning rooms and creating a miniature scanner that kids could send a stuffed animal through before their own procedure.
“But the feedback we always kept getting was that it’s just too loud, and it comes very suddenly, and the kids are really, really scared of that,” Pagaria said.
That fear might cause pediatric patients to move around, he said, potentially affecting the MRI image quality and, in some cases, requiring a repeat scan. Thus, Magnetic Stories was born to keep kids engaged and focused on something other than the unexplained noises of the scanner.
“We worked with our clinical hospital partner CUF in Portugal, plus some of the production houses—Leya, Area 23, Bro Cinema—to put it all together,” Pagaria said. “We brought the technical expertise of what it means when these sounds are produced by each sequence, and then they brought in the creative aspect of how we could transform that sound into something that the kids could actually enjoy to hear.”
He noted that the feedback to the project so far has been “overwhelmingly positive,” from doctors, parents and the patients themselves, as seen in a company video highlighting the technology.
“We have gotten some very useful feedback, some recommendations on how we can adapt some of these stories, but overall, they are very positive, because it helps them, one, to manage the patient better, but also to make sure that the patient is willing to listen to the instructions that they are given because it is all part of the story,” he said.
Magnetic Stories fits into a growing trend of focusing on the patient experience in healthcare, according to Pagaria, and its technology—or other tools that similarly modify audio-visual surroundings, like virtual and augmented reality technologies—could potentially be used to improve that experience in other applications beyond MRI scans.
“The core of what we are trying to do here is to humanize the whole episode,” he said. “These are all very, very powerful technologies, so I do feel the technology itself, of building some immersive experience as part of a care process, can be used in many places.”
For example, he suggested that a future project might focus on making radiotherapy machines less scary. That might include integrating the procedure into stories, as with the Magnetic Stories campaign, as well as improving the surroundings in the room and building demo models that kids can play with.
Indeed, Pagaria said, applying these approaches to a wide range of troublesome medical procedures to improve the patient experience is “what we are trying to do.”
“We have started with MR because MR, by far, is a very demanding modality which requires certain patient discipline in order to get high-quality images and, at the same time, creates noise which can be really scary. We said this is a really tough use case to start with—so let’s start here,” he said.