Crossing Borders for Care
- Client
- IHH Healthcare Malaysia
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Market
- Indonesia
- What we did
The challenge
Crossing a border for treatment is one of the biggest decisions a family makes. You’re asking a hospital in another country to look after someone you love, in a system you don’t know, at the worst possible time.
IHH had a lot to offer that family: second opinions, travel, accommodation, treatment and patient care, and all of it had to fit into one film. Listing it turns the film into an operations manual. Showing the hospitals turns it into a facility tour, which is where most healthcare advertising ends up.
Medical tourism is one of the highest-trust decisions a family makes.
The strategy
The daughter
The film had to earn trust from an Indonesian audience with no shortage of alternatives across the region. Trust here comes from showing that the brand understands what the family is going through, more than from equipment or accreditations.
That led us to the daughter. When an older parent falls ill, the adult child often becomes the de facto patient. She researches the options. She chases the second opinion. She books the travel and the accommodation. She sits by the bed and walks the corridor. The clinical journey belongs to the patient. The emotional one belongs to the person carrying them through it.
So the film follows a daughter taking her sick father from Indonesia to Malaysia, from the first doubt about a diagnosis, through travel and treatment, to the days in hospital and the slow walk back to health.
Everything IHH does for a cross-border family is in the film. None of it is announced. It appears as the things she runs into along the way.
How we made it
- Everything through her eyesIf the audience is with her, the film can’t step outside what she would see, hear or feel in that moment
- No voiceoverNothing is explained, because nobody explains things to her either. She works them out as she goes, the way a real family member does
- An observational cameraIt holds on to small moments: a hand on a shoulder, a corridor walked more times than anyone counted
- Casting and languageA family an Indonesian audience recognises instantly, in Bahasa Indonesia and English, tuned for Indonesian ears in a Malaysian setting
- One break in the ruleAs she searches online, the camera moves through her screen into the hospital, where IHH’s international patient services team is waiting to answer her. Built in post with CG, it’s the only moment the film leaves her point of view
In motion
The film
The outcome
Trust, built through a story
IHH ran the film as the anchor creative for their Indonesian campaign, across digital, social, agent and referral partner channels, and touchpoints along the patient journey.
