Essential types of animation for healthcare
Animation has the power to enhance the messaging and communication strategies of a huge range of different sectors. For healthcare companies, animation offers the opportunity to communicate more clearly and effectively with their patients, engage and inform both patients and staff, and dramatically boost their marketing ROI, all while enhancing their own unique brand identity and brand reputation. Let’s find out how.
Why is animation vital for the healthcare sector?
Animation has the power to enhance the messaging of a huge range of different sectors. But, when it comes to healthcare, the benefits are particularly pronounced. Thanks to its bold, engaging visuals, and the combination of visual and audio elements, animations are precisely designed to communicate concepts in a way that is both clear and entertaining.
The benefits that animation can offer to the healthcare sector include:
Simplified communication
Animation enables concepts to be communicated clearly, in a way that is easier for audiences to not only understand, but remember. This ability is particularly valuable in sectors like healthcare, where concepts are extremely complex. By using animated content, the combination of audio and visual elements enables messages to be communicated to audiences in a precise, succinct way. Then, the use of engaging characters and bold visuals improves viewers’ retention.
Patient education
One of the more unique requirements of healthcare communication is that these messages often need to be conveyed to audiences with little or no medical knowledge. Animation is an extremely effective way to break down the message into a description that is more digestible and easier to follow. Alongside this, the use of colourful, stylised elements makes otherwise bland, factual information engaging. In short, audiences will actually want to keep watching, to learn this key information.
Training and skills development
Alternatively, animated videos offer just as many benefits when communicating with medical professionals. Animated videos are widely used in educational explainer content, because of their power to engage audiences, communicate more effectively, and make messages more memorable. As a result, they make an invaluable addition to healthcare training and skills development.
This can include (but is not limited to) explaining:
- New medical technologies
- New medical research developments
- How to use certain medical devices
- Best practices
- Protocols for treatments
- Health campaigns or disease awareness
- Orientation and the onboarding process
- Policy and regulatory compliance
- Empathy and patient communication
- Emergency responses and protocols
- Techniques for managing stress or difficult, upsetting situations
Marketing and promotion of products and services
Alongside helping to communicate educational messages, you can also use animation to make promotional content more engaging for your patients. Animation is widely used in marketing campaigns, and it’s easy to see why. Animated content is inherently engaging, filled with creative and dynamic elements, and crisp, precise scripts. As a result, they offer an extremely effective way to promote products and services.
What’s more, the added bonus for animation in the medical sector is that it helps forward-thinking companies to markedly differentiate themselves from their competitors. In clear contrast with the plain, bland marketing content that is all-too-commonly used in healthcare, dynamic animations are a fant
The 4 essential types of animation for the healthcare industry
Let’s delve deeper into the primary use cases of animation in the healthcare industry, and explore the four key types of healthcare animation.
Educational animation
Healthcare educational animation videos are usually classified as explainer videos. As their name suggests, explainer videos are primarily designed to educate audiences, explaining the core message in a way that is clear and easy to understand.
In healthcare, educational animation videos can be used across a wide range of applications, spanning both internal and external communication. Externally, these include treatment and medication plans, symptom recognition guides, health campaigns (such as wellness guides), and even supporting remote healthcare services. Then internally, they can be used for everything from generally supporting the onboarding of new starters, to guiding teams through new technologies or research developments.
Educational animation videos are important because, in the context of healthcare, key messages are not only complex, but it is imperative that audiences understand them in full.
So, by using educational animation videos, healthcare companies can deliver important messages in a way that is clearer, more memorable, and is more likely to be seen by a wider audience. A great example of an engaging and informative healthcare educational animation can be seen here, in the concussion awareness video that we created for the UCI team.
Marketing and promotional animation
Marketing and promotional animation can encompass specific content like social posts, or a wider range of branded content, to be used across a company’s digital channels.
When it comes to marketing, one of the single biggest challenges is positioning your content amongst the endless sea of other digital adverts. With a staggering 95 million photos and videos being shared on Instagram alone every single day, being ‘seen’ is no mean feat.
So, marketers need to ensure they are absolutely maximising the creativity, engagement and entertainment value of their content. And, animations are precisely geared to achieve just that.
Marketing and promotional animation helps companies across a huge range of sectors to expand their audience outreach, and achieve a far more rewarding ROI from their promotional campaigns.
What’s more, since animated content also clearly depicts a company’s branding, this content also helps to boost key metrics such as brand identity, brand awareness and brand reputation.
Patient engagement animation
Patient engagement animation is another example of explainer videos, and it falls under the wider banner of healthcare educational animation.
But, the focus of patient engagement animation is to improve the health literacy of the patients themselves, and to establish greater understanding between the healthcare providers and their patients.
Patient engagement animations present topics - such as treatments, medication instructions, and information about relevant diseases - in a more accessible way. As a result, these animations help healthcare providers to increase the overall level of awareness, education and understanding of their patient base. This benefit will be extremely impactful for the healthcare providers, as they will find that they are working with generally more informed, conscientious and responsive people.
What’s more, by providing this content to patients, healthcare providers can ease any anxieties that their patients may have, and help them to make more informed decisions.
As you can imagine, this could have a fantastic impact on not only employee satisfaction, but also the success of your treatments.
Training and simulation animation
Another prime example of explainer videos, training and simulation animation is designed for internal communications, and to support the training and development of healthcare staff.
The versatility of animations means that they can be used to support a wide range of training topics, and even provide simulations of real scenarios.
Animation allows you to create any characters, backgrounds and situations (without any of the limitations or restrictions that come with live-action footage). This means that healthcare companies can create extremely specific and completely bespoke training videos, which cover all of the exact points that are required for the training, while providing a clear example application of the information, in-situ.
As a result, training and simulation animations offer a pioneering way to advance training programmes and foster the knowledge of different teams. Rather than sharing a PDF document of descriptive text, an animation brings these complex topics to life, giving viewers an infinitely clearer insight into this critical topic.
Conclusion
Although not commonly associated with healthcare, animation offers extraordinary potential within this professional context.
In everything from promotional social media campaigns to the development and training of your teams, animation makes communication clearer, more precise, more engaging and, as a result, more impactful.
Why work with an animation agency like OK Social?
OK Social is a motion graphic company, trusted by brands throughout the UK to create bold animations that deliver impressive results.
We have worked with some of the most recognisable brands in the world - including the likes of Coca-Cola, the BBC and Ford - and businesses spanning a huge range of sectors, from healthcare to hospitality.
To find out more about any of our animation services, or to start creating marketing animations that take your communication strategies to the next level, speak to our team today.
I’m Jack, the Motion Director here at OK Social. I’ve been working in the world of motion design and animation for nearly 10 years. I had the pleasure of working with leading agencies and brands around the world, such as Samsung, Ford, Shell, Deliveroo, and Starbucks, to name a few.
From a young age, I’ve always been interested in animation, from making stop-motion films in my room as a kid to learning animation on my first computer. It started as a passion and still is to this day. Part of what I do now is more than just animation. I help craft the narratives of the stories we tell to ensure they make an impact to the audience and remain worthy of their attention.
So how do I do that? It starts with asking the right questions, leading to solving the right problems. First, diagnose what the problem is. Then, we can start to see if we can help. I believe that communication plays a key role in delivering a smooth and successful project. Looking into the future, I’m excited to expand my knowledge into creating more engaging stories that make a difference.
