SickKids: Pain Squad App
The Hospital for Sick Children needed a creative solution to collect daily, accurate pain data from young cancer patients undergoing painful treatments. The challenge was that children were often too tired or discouraged to maintain traditional pain journals, rendering incomplete data useless. The hospital aimed to improve pain management by better understanding patient experiences.
Creative Idea
Gamified pain reporting by enlisting young patients as police recruits on a mobile app.
The Pain Squad app transformed tedious pain reporting for young cancer patients at SickKids into an engaging police-themed game, complete with celebrity encouragement and rank progression, ensuring consistent data collection by making a difficult task fun and empowering.
Creative Strategy Deconstructed
Company
SickKids Hospital needed to understand and minimize children's pain by collecting consistent, accurate daily data on their experiences.
Category
Traditional pain journals were tedious and difficult for young, fatigued cancer patients to maintain daily, leading to useless data.
Customer
Young cancer patients felt tired and discouraged, lacking motivation to complete detailed, manual pain reports after treatments.
Culture
Children's familiarity and engagement with mobile apps, gamified experiences, and aspirational figures like police officers.
Company
SickKids Hospital needed to understand and minimize children's pain by collecting consistent, accurate daily data on their experiences.
Category
Traditional pain journals were tedious and difficult for young, fatigued cancer patients to maintain daily, leading to useless data.
Strategy:
Transform a critical medical task into an engaging, empowering experience for young patients.
Customer
Young cancer patients felt tired and discouraged, lacking motivation to complete detailed, manual pain reports after treatments.
Culture
Children's familiarity and engagement with mobile apps, gamified experiences, and aspirational figures like police officers.
Strategy:
Transform a critical medical task into an engaging, empowering experience for young patients.
Results
The Pain Squad app is now set to roll out into four other Canadian hospitals. Due to its success, it will soon be made available everywhere. Parents stated it is an excellent tool and gives their children control over their pain, making them feel like a part of the process, and that it really helps.
4
other Canadian hospitals adopting the app
Everywhere
future availability
Strategy Technique
Build an Utility, Not an Ad
The Pain Squad app served as a functional tool, directly solving the hospital's critical data collection problem. It empowered children by giving them control and agency over their pain management, making the solution itself the campaign.
Explore Technique
Creative Technique
Gamification
Gamification effectively motivated young patients by turning a painful, mundane task into an exciting mission. The police force theme, ranks, and celebrity videos provided continuous engagement and a sense of purpose.
Explore Technique
Craft Breakdown
This campaign's craft excels in transforming a difficult and mundane medical task into an engaging, empowering experience for children through innovative digital gamification and authentic celebrity endorsement, making pain reporting accessible and motivating.
The Pain Squad app's design is exceptionally user-friendly for young patients, transforming a difficult medical task into an engaging, gamified experience with clear progression and visual feedback that genuinely motivates daily engagement.
The performances by the police drama actors are strong and authentic, providing credible and encouraging motivational messages within the app that resonate deeply with the children's imaginative play as 'Pain Squad' recruits.
The campaign's success stems from the synergy between the thoughtfully designed, interactive digital app and the celebrity-driven, gamified content, making a critical healthcare process feel like an exciting mission for children.
