Takeda, Snow Myeloma App ‘Being Patient’ Wins Pharma Choice Award

Takeda and Snow Companies won one of the top prizes in PM360’s annual Pharma Choice Awards for an app aimed at promoting understanding of what life with multiple myeloma is like.

PM360, a health marketing industry trade magazine, gives the awards each year for the best healthcare campaigns and initiatives across 15 categories.

Takeda’s global oncology patient advocacy program, along with patient engagement agency Snow, received a gold award in the app category for “Being Patient: Multiple Myeloma,” which uses activities, videos and more to illustrate the experience of a multiple myeloma patient.

Takeda said it designed the interactive app to give employees a deeper sense of patients’ emotional, financial, psychosocial, and physical experiences.

“This transformative experience serves as a driving force and reminder that patients remain at the core of all business decisions, no matter what role you serve at Takeda,” the company on a PM360 webpage describing the app.

“Being Patient: Multiple Myeloma” allows users to see what patients’ everyday lives are like. The app, which runs on the Android operating system, goes through a series of experiences starting from diagnosis. A journaling feature allows users to document thoughts and feelings throughout the experience. The app includes story narration and educational videos, as well as images from actual patients.

Guided activities emulate experiences associated with myeloma, a cancer characterized by anemia, fatigue, bleeding and bruising, and a risk of infection. One activity uses shoe inserts to simulate what it’s like dealing with peripheral neuropathy, nerve damage that is a common side effect of treatment for multiple myeloma.

In another section, the user is told: “Finally, after four days, enough stem cells are removed and the process is over. You are then admitted to the hospital and given high-dose chemotherapy overnight, destroying all your bone marrow. Over the next two weeks, you are in reverse isolation, meaning you must take every precaution against acquiring germs and getting sick.”

“Being Patient: Multiple Myeloma” is part of Takeda’s global oncology patient advocacy program, which helps cancer communities access care, delivers education about specific cancers, and seeks to influence policy on patients’ behalf. It also leads several advocacy and awareness programs and activities.

The 45 Pharma Choice winners are highlighted in the current issue of PM360. Gold, silver and bronze awards go to the top three vote-getters in each of the 15 categories. Winners were selected by PM360 readers — most of them pharmaceutical marketers — who cast more than 7,000 online votes based on content, format, imagination, industry influence and overall quality.

“The best judge for whether a campaign is creative, clever or award-worthy is someone who knows what goes into crafting a campaign and what it takes to make it great, so what better way to decide the year’s best creative than giving the thousands of people who do that work a chance to cast their vote,” Anna Stashower, PM360 CEO and publisher, said in a press release. “We congratulate all of this year’s winners, and are happy to present then both with a trophy and the knowledge that their peers place them at the top of all campaigns for the past year.”