Industry Insights
How Healthcare Video Production Can Succeed in Patient Engagement
Stepping into video production in the healthcare sector can be nerve-wracking. Many healthcare professionals see the internet as a roadblock instead of being helpful and many doctors complain that the public misdiagnoses themselves due to poor online information. This in turn puts a strain on the patient/doctor relationship and can lead to uncomfortable issues, but the cure for misinformation may be closer at hand than you think.
Video in the Healthcare Industry
A video a day keeps the doctor happy and the masses informed. Healthcare companies are slowly coming around to the idea of using the internet to leverage their knowledge in the space and have a positive impact on patients no matter where they are. One of the biggest outreach tools at your disposal is the medium of video. Whether you use video sharing to advertise services or to inform the general populace, healthcare videos help reduce misinformation and draw more interest to specific topics.
Leveraging Medical Video Production
Healthcare videos offer a unique look into the healthcare system with information prescribed straight from the white coat experts themselves. These videos can be leveraged in a few different ways, including:
Education: Relay information about ailments, symptoms and proper self-diagnosis procedures. Not only does this add credence to your own services, but it offers more self-sufficiency to the public and enables them to better care for themselves. Introduce them to hospital protocols and processes, analyze new disease strains or simply go over best practices to stay healthy when working from home. Whatever you choose, you and your patients benefit.
Promotion: There are patron saints for many different healthcare elements, celebrations for certain healthcare organizations and weeks or months dedicated to recognizing or celebrating the search or discovery of cures. Not everyone has a healthcare calendar handy though, which is where informational videos about upcoming events and celebrations come into play. You’ll keep the public informed and inspire them to come and join you in the event. A win-win!
Testimonials: Nothing inspires trust in a healthcare organization or medical professional more than a testimonial. If you can get your patients to talk about how wonderful you are and spread it across the internet, you’ll find people more trusting and receptive to your business.
Why Healthcare Adopting Video Is Important
Based on the previous points the answer may seem obvious, but let’s dive a little deeper. Information is power and when the prime objective in healthcare is keeping everybody healthy, why not tap into that power to make sure that happens?
Video marketing is the most effective way to advertise and communicate across all industries. Healthcare video production may seem like a side project at first glance, but if you are not putting out the information that helps people stay healthy and engage with your business, then you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Types of Medical Videos
Video is an incredible tool that could be a big player in the future of healthcare. Whether you’re going over medical services offered or explaining aspects of your organization, there are many ways that video can tell a story. Here are a few of the more prominent ones.
Public Service Announcements
This could range between a commercial about certain medical information to more complex concepts like a contagion breakout. For example, when COVID-19 was on the rise a few years ago, hospitals would put out PSAs with warning signs of infection, tips on how to stay healthy and next steps if you had contracted it.
Patient Case Studies
Similar to a testimonial, this form of video follows the journey of a particular patient as they go through the treatment process or explain their situation and how they’ve been handling it. Patient case studies are an amazing way to provide health information to your audience through empathy and resonance. A case study deals with sensitive subject matter but follows the human experience through the healing process to make it feel more meaningful to the audience.
Social Media Content
Social media has been explosively popular for years and now you can benefit from that popularity to spread your message across the internet. Social media videos are typically shorter than other channels but no less demanding. The entire video production process still goes into creating these shorts, the length of which is determined by the platform. For instance, if you’re creating a video for Twitter, it has to be under two minutes and 20 seconds long, while Instagram allows videos between three seconds and ten minutes, with up to 60 minutes for select accounts.
Medical Training
Reaching out to a wider audience is great, but sometimes you need to convey essential information to your own medical professionals. Medical training videos walk through the steps of whatever process or procedure and lay them out in a simple and easily replicated manner. Medical training films also have the benefit of not only being customizable to a very fine degree, but can be cast and scripted to meet the needs of any project. You can use them for in-depth studies or quick employee training videos, whichever you feel is most pressing.
Health Information
You can combine animation visuals in a video to create an easily digestible and resonant experience for your audience that goes over any topic of your choosing. This can be as simple as a guide to flu symptoms or as complex as an HIV drug resistance report. The animation keeps your audience drawn in while making the content engaging and understandable.
Health Animation vs. Live Action Videos
One of the most impactful choices you can make when you decide on a video is whether it will be animated or live action.
Animations are usually made to explain how products, services and software solutions work or to surprise and delight the audience. Live action videos often humanize organizations and foster relationships because you are showing real people in relation to the topic instead of a graphic with a disembodied voice.
The most important aspect of your video is the video content itself, while the method that you tell the story is secondary. In some instances one method may be preferred over the other. For example, if you are putting out a video where the target audience is children under the age of 13, animation is more likely to grab their attention than live action. At the end of the day, you tell the story in whatever way seems more natural.
Complex Ideas and Patient Engagement
Every example so far has mentioned an audience in some form and that’s because the end goal is your audience engagement. It may sound obvious, but video speaks to patients in ways that a doctor can’t do on their own. It breaks concepts down to more digestible pieces, entices patients to be proactive in their search for a healthy lifestyle and educates them on the dos and don’ts of healthcare.
Video is one of the most impactful ways you can create moments of patient education without the experience feeling forced or sterilized. With the right message and production procedure, anything is possible. You could convey the importance of vaccines or regular checkups with the right production to give the video substance.
Process Behind Medical Video Marketing
As you may imagine, the process behind video production can be complex and time-consuming, but the end result is worth every minute. In order to produce videos that are beloved by all (hopefully), the steps that go into a healthcare video are:
- Research & Analysis
- Script Writing
- Character & Style Sheet
- Storyboard Development
- Voice Over Recording
- Animating Stage/Live Action Filming
- Sound Effects & Music
- Translation & Foreign Voice (If necessary)
- Delivery & Formats
Yes, that does look like an exhausting amount of work, but when you see a video like this, it all comes together beautifully and makes the effort worth it. If you’re still on the fence, maybe a healthcare video production company can help?
Finding Your Healthcare Video Production Company
If you’re trying to reach a wider audience but want a second set of eyes or an entire team at your back to create lasting stories through video, Spot Content Studio has the answers. Our team specializes in just about any type of video you can think of and handles every step of the process, so all you have to do is give us the concept and resources to make the magic happen. If you have a healthcare video in mind or just want to talk about how cool marketing videos can be, we’re always here to chat.