Introducing MOXIE, the First Personalized Communications Platform That Will Improve Your Health

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - October 28, 2015) - Emergence Creative, along with their partners The University of Calgary, the Interdisciplinary Chronic Disease Collaboration (ICDC) and Locus Health, are excited to announce the launch of MOXIE, an innovative personalized health engagement system to improve patient fidelity to a regular medication schedule. The MOXIE platform includes an online portal, text messaging, direct mail, daily patient check-ins and gamification -- all aimed at changing daily behaviours that put patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure at risk of heart attacks and strokes.

"Understanding the 'real world' challenges that people experience, and communicating with them in engaging ways outside of the hospital setting is the key to successful health outcomes in our view," says Dr. Raj Pannu, the CEO of Emergence Creative. "We are thrilled to be involved in this large collaborative effort to improve the lives of Canadians through innovative and imaginative communication strategies."

Find your MOXIE

MOXIE is a fully-integrated lifestyle brand that delivers a holistic communications platform encouraging adherence to cardio-protective medications among chronic disease patients. While examining strategies to optimize patient health, the ICDC team realized that simply by getting at-risk patients to take their medications on a regular basis, they might be able to significantly decrease the occurrence of cardiac events. Recognizing communication to be an important factor in managing chronic disease, ICDC made it a central element of their public health intervention research program.

Much like the operating system that Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with in Spike Jonze's movie Her, MOXIE seeks to create a patient experience that feels personalized, responsive and understanding of individual lifestyle contexts, by combining personal, social and entertainment elements. The MOXIE platform represents a revolution in managing chronic medical conditions by influencing patient behaviour.

ICDC brought in the marketing and communications expertise of Emergence Creative, a New York-based communications agency, to tackle the problem from a human perspective. Through extensive consultation, focus group testing and research, Emergence Creative developed a brand identity that resonates with the intended audiences and a messaging system that addresses the complex factors that influence people's daily health decisions.

The MOXIE concept was created by Emergence and their technical partners Locus Health as a learning platform that customizes content based on patient personality profiles. This kind of human-centered approach to public health outreach is completely innovative, embracing a personalized perspective over a traditionally medical one.

"Finding new approaches to decreasing health risks for chronic disease patients and associated costs for health care systems is central to the mission of ICDC," says Dr. Marcello Tonelli, Associate Vice-President (Research) at University of Calgary and ICDC team co-leader. "We're delighted to have this opportunity to work with a leading communication agency on such an important topic, particularly considering that chronic disease management is the biggest challenge facing health systems today. MOXIE is a new way to engage people with chronic diseases in a meaningful way within their daily lives without being paternalistic or overly technical," he adds.

About Emergence

Founded in 2014, Emergence Creative is a global creative agency that applies the tools of branding, advertising, marketing, and communications to social impact issues, with specific focus on renewable energy, international development and health. Founded by Raj Pannu and Eric Verkerke, formerly colleagues at McCann Worldgroup in the Global Health division in New York, Emergence took shape out of a need for professional strategic communications in the social impact sector. Using a mix of brand storytelling, human engagement and scientific rigour, Emergence creates culturally relevant communications solutions to issues that have traditionally been tackled from more conventional approaches. To find out more, visit www.emergence-creative.com.

About ICDC

The Interdisciplinary Chronic Disease Collaboration (ICDC) is a motivated team of researchers whose overall objective is to improve the health of patients with non-communicable chronic diseases such as; hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). The ICDC team is a collaboration between health care decision-makers, scientists and educators from 22 key disciplines, that was formed to examine the issues related to treating patients with or at high risk of developing non-communicable chronic diseases. The team focuses on population health, clinical research and health services research to execute this research program, whose objective is to improve the health of patients living with chronic diseases. This will be accomplished by developing, implementing and evaluating novel interventions which reduce the clinical and economic impact of hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and vascular disease. To find out more, visit: www.icdc.ca.

MEDIA: For more information on Emergence or ICDC or to arrange interviews with Emergence Creative Founder and CEO, Raj Pannu or ICDC team co-leader, Dr. Braden Manns, please contact us at pr@emergence.com.