24 Mar Clarity Over Complication: Creating Compelling HealthTech and Healthcare Messaging
The needs, technology, and science behind healthtech products and services are all complex.
But the messaging that your company uses to position itself in the marketplace should be the opposite. Communications professionals often skew toward making their marketing messaging complicated by using jargon and descriptions of technology that help prove that the product or service truly is the best. Developing an intuitive, easy-to-understand message that works to differentiate your company and its offering can be challenging. It takes years of experience wading through the complexities of healthcare to find the core story, as well as a talent for messaging itself.
There is an old writer’s apology: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” The quip (originally attributed to Blaise Pascal) has endured because it’s true: Distilling complex ideas down to their essence takes time and experience.
Below are a few guiding principles that will help you create clear and compelling healthcare messaging while avoiding the pitfalls that can lead to overcomplication and confusion.
Healthcare Is Not That Complex
Much of healthcare boils down to two goals: taking care of patients or taking care of the people taking care of patients. Healthtech usually helps do both, enabling clinicians to take better care of patients or supporting those clinicians to do something faster, more efficiently, or simply better.
The communication surrounding the tech should be as simple as those two details: caring for patients or supporting those who do. The further you stray from those messages, the higher the likelihood that you’re actually complicating your marketing message.
Factors That Make Healthtech Marketing Seem Complex
A big reason why healthtech marketing can often seem so complex is simply that the healthcare industry is itself akin to an intertwined thicket of competing departmental silos and overlapping regulations. The deeper you go, the more dizzyingly complex it can all get.
Healthcare is a little more than one-sixth of the U.S. economy, accounting for 17.5 percent of our country’s GDP or $4.9 trillion. That’s in part because healthcare is so expensive, but it’s also because healthcare is a series of industries layered on top of other industries, usually one trying to help another through a particular regulatory hurdle. This intertwining is complicated, and it makes industry communicators feel that they need to explain it all in great detail.
Here’s an example of an actual healthtech product description:
A dynamic web-based technology that provides hospitals with a powerful solution to effectively manage the time-sensitive and complex workflow and documentation requirements needed to satisfy RAC record requests, process determination letters and navigate the multi-tiered rebuttal and appeal process.
If you actually read all the way through that description, this is what the product description was trying communicate: This is a software product that manages a workflow around avoiding a particular type of government audit, which itself exists to unearth fraud in Medicare billing — fraud that exists because of other regulatory complexities that make it easier than it should be to overbill the government for healthcare.
Or, to simplify: This product helps your healthcare organization better manage RAC audits, which saves you time and money so you can focus more on patient care.
Stay Close to the Most Important Issue in Healthtech: Patient Care
No matter where you are in the healthcare world, trace your path back to patient care in as few steps as possible. After all, what is healthcare about if not taking care of patients or helping people live longer and healthier lives? And what is healthtech about if not leveraging the power of technology for the same purposes?
This isn’t easy. Simplifying the message for complex healthcare products takes experience, skill, and commitment. There are forces everywhere conspiring to muck it up, make it complicated, or divorce your product from your purpose. Don’t succumb to those forces.
Remember, the problem your healthtech addresses may feel incredibly complex because the problems in healthcare really are complicated. Yet the goal of your marketing is to connect the solution back to patient care and to tell the story of how it helps take care of patients or helps those who do.
Interested in creating remarkable content in healthtech? Get in touch.
