4Cori x Synthesia

In a consultation, patients hear everything and remember a fraction. 4Cori changes that, reaching patients in their own language, in a voice they trust, without ever taking the clinician out of the room. The technology behind it is Synthesia.

The challenge

Understanding shapes everything: the care choices a patient makes, how well they prepare and how well they recover. But a consultation is a lot to absorb. People are anxious, information comes fast, and most of it is gone by the time they get home. The leaflets sent to fill the gap do what writing does well, which is to wait until someone is ready to read them.

Ms Samantha Tross, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon working across the NHS and private practice, spends much of her time preparing patients for surgery. "As a surgeon, I can't make a decision for the patient," she says. "I can provide them with the information to enable them to make the decision for themselves." There is only so much anyone absorbs in one anxious appointment, and the reams of information she sent home went only so far.

Mr Giles Davies, a consultant oncoplastic breast surgeon and founder of The Breast Clinic, also shared his experience. “The multilingual features allow me to provide a wide range of patient groups with culturally aligned information that is easy to digest to optimise shared decision making - this can really improve the outcome of their care”. 

The shift

That is what Graham Rapier built 4Cori to provide. 4Cori films a clinician just once, then builds them a whole library of short patient videos in their own voice, tailored to their specialty: the procedures they perform, the questions patients most often ask. 

Scripting, production and design are handled by 4Cori's team, and the clinician's own time goes on review and approval rather than starting from a blank page.

From that one session, the clinician has a Synthesia avatar that presents the whole library in 40+ languages, updated the moment guidance changes, with no need to film again. 

The impact

One of the clearest examples comes from a London breast cancer clinic, where Mr Davies has spent years researching what patients themselves report about their recovery. After surgery he checks how his patients are doing, physically and emotionally, through short check-ins led by his own avatar.

As plain-text emails, those check-ins were completed about 30% of the time. As video, 83%. He now hears from the majority of his patients rather than a minority, early enough to act on what they tell him, often on the emotional side of recovery people rarely raise unprompted. 

Language changes the conversation entirely. A frightening diagnosis explained in a patient's first language is clearer, and the effort itself registers. "It tells them: this person has thought of me," says Mr Davies, who has seen an eightfold rise in international referrals since offering translated video.

For Ms Tross, it makes her care more personal, not less. Patients watch in their own time, replay what they missed, and arrive already understanding the basics, so their time together goes further. "This can't replace the face-to-face patient and doctor interaction," says Ms Tross, "but it enhances it." 

Why it matters 

What makes it work is human, not technical: the clinician is there at the start and the end. Every video is led by a clinician and signed off before it goes live. 4Cori holds the PIF TICK, the UK mark for trustworthy health information, and produces its libraries in line with that standard.

That is what 4Cori delivers, powered by Synthesia, and the choice of platform was deliberate. As Rapier puts it, "probably more important for my decision-making was the security and the approach to data privacy that Synthesia has."

"No one delivers a medical message quite like a clinician does," says Rapier. Get it right, he believes, and clinician-led video becomes standard in good care: "you'll know it's come from a clinician, you'll be able to trust it, and act on it with confidence."