Relevate Health has purchased the pharma and life sciences unit of Level Ex, which develops video games for physicians, from German medical device maker Brainlab. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
As part of the pharma division’s spinoff from Brainlab, the unit will be rebranded as “Level Ex Games Powered by Relevate Health.”
About 40 employees will join the 2024 MM+M Agency 100 honoree, including Sam Glassenberg, Level Ex founder and CEO, who will continue to lead it as a standalone studio.
Munich-based Brainlab has owned Level Ex since 2020. The company has operated as two studios, one half devoted to training doctors to use medical devices in surgical settings and the other for use in pharmaceutical marketing. As part of the deal, Brainlab is retaining the medtech side, while the pharma unit is being spun off.
The unit creates game-based content for training doctors in various medical specialities. These can be used in all phases of marketing, from pre-launch disease state education, at the time of launch to learn about products, or later in the life cycle when new data come out.
As an example, imagine a speaker program involving hundreds of physicians. The presenter shows a slide with a QR code and everyone snaps the code with their phone camera. Suddenly everyone’s competing to identify manifestations of a disease or to diagnose the patient.
Relevate and Level Ex work with the same type of marketing clients but deliver value in different ways.
Level Ex does this through its video games, while the agency uses data on healthcare professionals to drive activation across multiple channels and content formats. The agency plans to leverage games to reach more HCPs through its omnichannel approach.
“We can offer a completely unique, immersive content capability through the experience of games and play,” said Relevate CEO Tim Pantello. The combination “just makes a lot of sense.”
Level Ex has depended on clients to promote its video game experiences. Now, the agency can help engage health professionals with this type of content.
“We can send them a link, a QR code, a text or email,” Pantello explained. “We can serve it through our key account network and hospital systems. The fit is just so tight.”
Through that closer integration, Pantello added, he wants to accelerate adoption of Level Ex’s technology, and in the process, collect a wealth of physician-level data.
“We’re going to learn a lot about their knowledge gaps, behaviors and attitudes,” he predicted. “When we have that type of deep, more meaningful engagement, it’s going to make the analytics much richer in terms of understanding a physician’s needs.”
Glassenberg, for his part, said he also foresaw strong synergies in joining Relevate.
“Our vision as a company is that games are just accepted as a fundamental force accelerating the adoption of new therapeutics,” he said. “In order to do that, we really need to be part of a company that is focused on the life sciences as customers.”
Level Ex, whose clients include 20 out of the top 40 life science firms, works with pharma brands to enhance HCPs’ experience with various peer-to-peer programs. Product theaters and dinner meetings, though, aren’t always known for their entertainment value.
“These are places and spaces where getting 180 slides presented to you is not a great experience,” quipped Pantello. “That’s currently the way a lot of medical education and pharmaceutical promotion is done. Physicians are people, too, and they want to have a great experience.”
To that end, many production houses create mechanism-of-action (MOA) videos and molecular animations. Level Ex’s technology takes it a step further, enabling people to interact with such content through play.
Before founding Level Ex in 2015, Glassenberg worked at LucasArts and led Microsoft’s advanced graphics team. His games have multiple skill levels and enable users to unlock new equipment as they progress through challenges.
Like Angry Birds or Call of Duty, they balance feelings of reward and frustration, leading to the release of the neurochemical dopamine as well as maximizing learning and behavior change, Glassenberg said.
Indeed, the companies say these experiences can lead to more meaningful engagement and real behavior change on the part of clinicians.
“On average we’re seeing HCPs engage with the Level Ex content anywhere between four and 19 minutes,” reported Pantello. “And script lift ranges from 15% to 34%.”
Sitting through a speaker program that allows clinicians to compete and collaborate with colleagues on their phones to diagnose and treat virtual patients, versus one that’s not gamified, “feels like the nineties,” joked Glassenberg. “What we’re here to do is raise the bar and raise expectations for HCPs.”
He continued, “With new treatments, with clinical study data, the best way to learn is to play with it. You’re not going to do that on patients…I let you play with the data, with different diagnostic scenarios.”
Traditional mass promotion to HCPs “is just no longer effective,” echoed Pantello.
“We can help pharma brands be more relevant with every single HCP interaction,” he said. “That comes with the use of data, the application of omnichannel. Now, it comes with the innovative educational experience from the leading medical video game studio.”
Among other Level Ex execs joining Relevate are Matt Baggett, SVP/head of pharma sales, and the rest of its management team on the pharma side of the business.
The purchase marks Relevate’s fourth acquisition behind PE backer Mountaingate Capital, following Arteric in 2020, Axon Communications in 2021 and ConneXion360 in 2022.
Relevate’s 2023 revenue grew nearly 20% to $76.6 million, from $64.0 million in 2022, according to MM+M’s June Agency 100 report.
