Health tech provider C2-Ai secured a first of its kind ICS-wide contract, after helping NHS organisations find high-risk patients on waiting lists. Highland Marketing led a supporting high-impact media campaign that drew out human stories, put the spotlight on pioneering clinical teams, publicised metrics, and helped to generate national attention for game-changing AI. Dr Mark Ratnarajah, UK managing director and Steve Barnett, VP for global engagement, explain.
Innovative health tech provider C2-Ai has built a strong reputation for its ability to help NHS organisations to identify hidden risks and prevent harm.
The UK company has a history in equipping healthcare providers with the deep intelligence needed to assess the safety and performance of services, and the ability to understand whether they are delivering expected outcomes for each of their patients.
With national attention fixed on elective recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic, the company shifted its focus to respond to an urgent unmet need in the NHS: rapidly creating and then scaling a forward-looking tool to help pioneering clinicians find patients at greatest risk of harm on growing waiting lists.
Building confidence and credibility for a complex AI idea
C2-Ai had already seen the benefit of communicating its impact in clinical environments, having worked with health tech specialists at Highland Marketing to publicise achievements in acute settings.
One NHS trust, for example, had used the company’s AI backed technology to identify and respond to patients at risk of acute kidney injury – linked with around 100,000 deaths in the UK.
An 80% reduction in hospital acquired AKI was subsequently observed at the trust, paving the way for a media campaign that generated awareness around patient safety gains – with strong coverage across multiple publications helping to prove the impact of C2-Ai’s technology.
“It was really important in those early days to get people to be aware that artificial intelligence is an established technology within healthcare,” says Steve Barnett, C2-Ai’sVP for global engagement.
“The outcomes from the work were initially quite complex, but working with Highland we were able to look at the messaging, look at how we communicated that information. And it played very well. The use of language, the phrasing, and the presentation was absolutely what was needed for that early work, to build confidence and credibility.”
Communicating waiting list impact through real-world stories: Messages that ‘resonate’
As the NHS sought to respond to the elective recovery challenge, forward-thinking clinicians in one trust approached C2-Ai with a challenge: Could its technology identify patients on waiting lists at highest risk of harm?
A solution was developed and deployed in months, with rapid results emerging – including an NHS England backed study that revealed reductions in harm, reduced emergency and ICU admissions, substantive bed days saved, and extensive time released for staff.
Developments involved NHS teams using the technology to understand how to improve outcomes for patients in greatest need, where to treat them, and how to target prehabilitation support to prevent deterioration as people waited.
A multi-faceted media campaign accompanied different stages of the programme. Metrics were complemented by human stories – from both clinicians and patients – in order to create compelling press materials that were widely picked up in target media. Stories appeared in publications including the i Newspaper, Health Service Journal, Digital Health, National Health Executive, Health Tech Newspaper, Building Better Healthcare, and many other target titles, at several milestones in the initiative.
Dr Mark Ratnarajah, C2-Ai’s UK managing director, believes articulating such stories in the media has been an important part of success.
“You can then communicate the actual benefits of what you’re doing, not just the science behind it, but the real-world stories,” he says. “Being able to articulate that in a way that people can understand and that resonates with them, such that they can cast away some of the noise that’s created within the marketplace. This is a very, very important thing to be able to do.”
“We found that working with Highland Marketing to create some of those stories meant that we could convey that message much more powerfully,” he explains.
“This is a multidisciplinary capability, and we need operational teams, we need clinical leadership, we need funders from NHS England. And so, having stories that people can understand who may not necessarily be clinical, but are still part of the decision-making process, is vital. Being able to kind of galvanize that thinking by using these sorts of media was really, really helpful.”
A first of its kind ICS-wide contract, a positive story for healthcare
With support also provided in disseminating thought leadership from people within C2-Ai, and from NHS customers, a strong message already being promoted through news stories, was reinforced by key opinion leaders.
One milestone came as C2-Ai won an ICS-wide contract. This was widely reported by key trade press, including an in-depth focus in HSJ’s tech focussed newsletter The Download.
Following an unprecedented challenging time for the NHS, and at a time of many negative press reports relating to health, Ratnarajah says it has been compelling to “be able to articulate a story that is positive news”.
“It was absolutely vital and important to us that we were able to demonstrate that actually this is as much an NHS win, as it is for ourselves,” he says.
“The sharing and pooling of ideas and being in front of fora where you have like-minded people, and audiences that are receptive to those discussions is vastly important.”
Barnett agrees: “One of the really important things about working with Highland, has been the ability and the desire of the team to work with all of the stakeholders, not just clinicians, but operational people, stakeholders in the wider NHS transformation community. But also working very closely with the communications teams of our partners.
“The really important thing about the work that we do, is that the delivery is done by the health service, which is why we’ve deliberately worked with them to showcase their work, the work that we enable through the technology that we deliver.”
Working with a specialist health tech marketing team
C2-Ai has enjoyed significant success for multiple reasons – including its network, senior NHS sponsorship, the academic rigour that proves the technology’s impact, an innovative approach to an urgent unmet need, and the credibility of its team.
Working alongside a health tech focussed team at Highland Marketing has also played an important role, says Barnett:
“Sometimes we need to take a step back and have a conversation with an informed body about what’s happening in the market, what’s important, what people are saying, who’s active, how we reach out to those people. How we can phrase our daily work in such a way that is understandable to them, that they can then build it into their narratives.
“The health service tends to see external suppliers as ‘other’. And working with Highland has certainly helped us to go through those barriers, to develop good, strong working relationships and friendships with the people that we’re dealing with.”
Highland Marketing has continued to support C2-Ai in other areas, including the launch of a new business, Precisia, which is focussed on using data to allow research and medicines to be better targeted to meet patient needs.
An ongoing ‘proactive press office’ service has also identified opportunities to contribute to debate.
Barnett says that an “active agency” approach has reached the right people to “drive our business forward, and also to drive the story forward”.
He says: “We feel that Highland Marketing has become part of our team, rather than a service provider to it. And that’s probably one of the first times in my career I can actually, hand on heart, say that’s working.”
