Making every minute count
MA Department of Public Health
The Challenge
Physicians’ time is precious. To fight opioid addition, the state needed some.
An invaluable tool in the state’s efforts to reduce opioid misuse and addiction, The Department of Public Health (DPH) Massachusetts Prescription Awareness Tool (MassPAT) keeps track of prescription histories and helps doctors and medical professionals make better-informed decisions for their patients. But despite being a requirement for prescribers to use, when DPH hired us, they were having trouble reaching critical hold-outs to register and use the system.
Services Provided:
- Advertising
- Social/Cause Marketing
- Digital
- Strategic Messaging
- Branding
- Motion/Graphics/Animation
By raising the stakes, we made the time investment seem small – but essential.
The Solution
Make the case that it’s worth it
Argus partnered with DPH to develop a campaign to encourage prescribers to register, and, more importantly, use MassPAT regularly in their practices. Our approach was research-based from the start: we conducted phone interviews with prescribers before we even kicked-off the creative process, focusing in particular on the barriers to full implementation. Built around the tagline “MassPAT: It takes a minute,” our campaign drew an unavoidable connection between the small cost of compliance and the potential human impact.
To target providers where they live, executions included two 4-page inserts in the New England Journal of Medicine, distributed to over 11,000 subscribers in Massachusetts, as well as display and pre-roll online ads with 11.5 million impressions and over 28,000 clickthroughs.
The Results
A bold message leads to action.
Initially, our campaign resulted in over 19,000 new sessions on MassPAT – an incredible tally for an audience that had almost willfully ignored the system previously. We were recently contracted to extend the MassPAT campaign to a new target audience: pharmacists.
