As anyone knows who’s ever been in a relationship — even with a spouse or a partner, a friend or a family member — communication can be difficult. You said one thing, but the other person heard something else.
With medical communications it’s crucial to be understood immediately, because lives are literally on the line. We at JB Ashtin have to get the messaging right so that the medical treatments we’re supporting find their way to patients who need them.
That’s why we have many ways of telling stories and many methods of getting those stories out — but we back all of them with processes that help to ensure that the communications are effective.
What do we mean by “effective”?
“To us, an effective medical communications initiative is when our audience resonates with the message,” says our CEO and founder, Joni Bradley. “When, for example, healthcare professionals understand the data we’re presenting and they know right away which patient’s is going to benefit from it, we know the message has landed.”
After all, if you put out a message but no one understands it or acts upon it, it’s like the tree falling in the proverbial forest with no one around to hear it. Because we know that the impact of successful medical communications leads to improving and even saving people’s lives, our work starts with four steps:
- Understanding the message
- Understanding the audience
- Establishing the delivery platform
- Defining success
Not all cars are the same. They vary in design, in target audience, in purpose, and in branding (that is, marketing communications). A convertible is very different from a compact, and an SUV isn’t a family sedan. Each has its own story.
Packaging medical communications for a target audience tells a similar tale, and knowing the communications vehicle, or delivery platform, is a crucial part of gauging ultimate effectiveness.
“Are we looking at a publication that we’re supporting, the results of a clinical trial that gets published in a major medical journal?” says Joni. “Or are we putting together an advisory board meeting? Or a slide presentation that gets delivered by a healthcare provider to a group of other healthcare providers? Each of these requires a different way to tell a story.”
Success can be measured in number of prescriptions, in audience engagement with digital media, in references by notable third parties, number of downloads, and many other methods. Ultimately, how we measure success is determined by the goals of the medical communication, whether we’re launching an initiative, which is somewhat like a one-off, or a campaign, where we are a partner involved in a larger communications effort.
In addition to the message, the audience, the platform, and success, there are two more components, so ingrained at JB Ashtin that we almost forgot to mention them: quality assurance and good storytelling.
We have a well-defined quality assurance program that brings multiple sets of eyes to the work we create. Our eagle-eyed editors and writers work to confirm spelling, punctuation, noun-verb agreements, subject-pronoun agreements, and all those fun elements of high school grammar that some of us eagerly embraced. Why do we need to be so focused on “their/there/they’re,” “farther/further” and, say, the Oxford comma? Because we want the message to connect with people – and the moment someone spots a typo, his or her mind begins to drift. And, worse, doubt creeps in: I now see this mistake — is the rest of this reliable? Reliability is essential, so we take a good hard look at all our communications, doing our best to make sure the grammar and spelling are rock solid.
And good storytelling? Who doesn’t like a good story? We keep the copy lively, engaging, and brief. People in the medical science community are busy. When possible, we keep the story short; when it needs to be longer, we focus on active verbs to keep the reader engaged.
In all cases, we lure people in to read our communications and glean the key information quickly and indelibly, because we know all this important: People’s lives and wellbeing are at stake.