REFRAME HEALTH LAB

In 2011 Nick de Pencier teamed up with his long time friend Dr. Mike Evans and illustrator Liisa Sorsa to direct and produce the short whiteboard health video 23 ½ Hours which instantly went viral and has been viewed by more than seven million people in many languages worldwide. The team has gone on to produce more than fifty subsequent health videos which tell evidence-based health stories that engage and entertain patients and care providers alike. 

Their YouTube channel has 31 million views and 176 thousand subscribers, and the videos have been widely utilized in health care settings such as medical clinics, emergency rooms, and rehab centres. They’ve also been integrated into Wikipedia pages, featured on the hit Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” and profiled in a wide range of publications from JAMA, the BMJ, and the Lancet, to the Reader’s Digest. 

YouTube Channel
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What We Do

This is a different kind of health lab where there are no white coats or test tubes. Instead Reframe Health Lab fuses clinicians and creatives, filmmakers and patients, social entrepreneurs and best evidence to create “edutaining” health care information. The Lab develops everything from videos and infographics to websites and mobile apps.

Contact us at info@mercuryfilms.ca to discuss your upcoming health communication project, or learn more about what we do at The Lab.

See some video examples below:

About founder Dr. Mike Evans

Dr. Mike Evans was a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Toronto, Lead of Digital Preventive Medicine at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, as well as the first international recipient of an endowed university chair in Patient Engagement. In fall 2016, Dr. Mike moved to Apple in California to help lead health innovation. He will be on faculty and doing part time clinic at Stanford.

Dr Mike is best known for developing innovative health messaging for the world. “We wanted people to get the right information, in the right way, at the right time… sometimes that’s in a doctor’s office, but most of the time it’s not.” To make this happen he brought together creatives, patients, and clinicians in a media lab (now Reframe) to create evidence-based health media that was engaging enough to be infectious on social media. “I think the biggest missing work force in health is the public, and that by engaging Peer-to-Peer Health Care we can get the best advice embedded in the largest relationships of care: friend to friend, loved one to loved one, as well as caregiver to patient.

He has started a medical school for the public (Mini-Med School @ U of T), written an award winning kids book (the Adventures of Medical Man), has been Chief Editor of a Canada’s top selling primary care textbook of medicine, the Scientific Officer for Knowledge Translation at the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, doctor for the Sochi Olympics, and was the house doctor for the CBC weekend morning radio show, Fresh Air.

Some of his awards include being chosen as the top 10 innovators in health by the Canadian Medical Association, top 45 Canadians over 45, and selected as 2015 top 10 most important doctors in Canada by the Medical Post. For the documentary series on patient advice, “The Truth of It” (with filmmaker Wendy Rowland) Dr. Evans was awarded the 2015 Canadian Cancer Research Alliance award for Distinguished Service to Cancer Research. For all of the above, Dr. Evans was awarded the McNeil Medal from the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of his outstanding ability to promote and communicate science to the public.

Dr. Evans has 3 kids, 5 bicycles, 4 parents, and plays hockey 2 times a week, three if you ask his wife Sue, who is also a doctor.