Gold
Horizon Therapeutics and Area 23
Gout Revisited
For 400 years, people with gout have been stigmatized and stereotyped. The illness has famously been portrayed as a disease of the foot, impacting overfed and greedy rich white men. Monstrous illustrations have reinforced those perceptions, century after century — and Horizon’s sales reps had long noticed that these illustrations often hung in rheumatologists’ offices.
This website draws on those medical and political illustrations, painstakingly recreating them to show the reality: Gout is a systemic disease, and those with little means are far more impacted than those who are affluent.
To change rheumatologists’ perceptions, with a budget of $125,000, this effort set out to reach the top 250 opinion leaders in the field. And as it influenced the influencers, it wanted to make them aware of how these outdated perceptions shape damaging biases in current treatment.
Judges say this use of historical images to highlight current biases is among the most effective they’ve seen. This blame-the-patient perception still contributes to the condition being underdiagnosed, underprioritized and undertreated.
The site contains facts that refute each myth: Black women and men may have higher lifetime risk. Family history, not diet, is the best predictor. And gout disproportionately impacts those in poverty.
“We’d like to think that medicine is impervious to biases, but clearly it’s not,” says one rheumatologist.
Within a month, the campaign saw impressive results at medical congresses, as key opinion leaders began asking for updated imagery to use in their conference presentations.
Silver
Teva and Fingerpaint
SCZ Now
The standard of care for schizophrenia is broken, and patient outcomes have not measurably improved since the 1950s. This paradigm-shifting site delivers data-backed stories of hope and progress while recognizing providers’ daily challenges. Its compelling docuseries showed these new ideas in action, driving 50,000 visits.
