In the summer of 2019, Outset Medical was ready to be known. Tablo — their FDA-cleared dialysis system, designed to be dramatically easier to learn, use, and deploy than anything else in the category — had shipped to its first customers, and the company was ready to turn on the faucet: build the brand, tell the story, and bring the market to them. We embedded that fall with immersive discovery and strategy, shot our first customer story on-site in Alabama, and mapped a month-by-month content roadmap for 2020.
Then COVID arrived, and the roadmap stopped making sense in the space of a week. Hospitals were overwhelmed by critically ill patients who needed dialysis at rates no one had planned for — while the specialized staff and infrastructure dialysis traditionally demands were suddenly out of reach. So was our access to hospitals themselves.
We threw out the plan and met the moment. Tablo was built for exactly this kind of crisis: give a hospital an outlet and a faucet, and a converted cafeteria becomes a dialysis unit; give an ICU nurse a couple hours of training, and they're treating patients with confidence. The story was no longer a polished product launch — it was a dauntless company doing whatever it took to get its technology to the systems, providers, and patients who needed it most.
Our operation rebuilt itself around that story. iPhone footage from clinical reps on the ground. A deployment to Guam alongside the federal government, documented over WhatsApp with consent forms gathered on the fly. Scrappy, fast, and intentional — content that showed what Tablo could do when health systems were stretched to their limits.
That momentum helped carry Outset to an IPO on a timeline nobody had penciled in, and our role matured with it: public-company scrutiny meant on-label vigilance, airtight consents, and buttoned-up process — without surrendering the distinctive voice that suits a technology this different. Seven years on, through market shifts, new competitors, highs and lows, we're still embedded — the keeper of their institutional knowledge, and the partner they call to meet whatever moment comes next.