Animation is a content type that is almost entirely unique, in its ability to engage, inform and maximise understanding.
There’s a reason why brands - across all industries - are increasingly turning to animation. By adding an animated video to your marcomms strategy, you can increase audience engagement, ensure viewers understand (and retain) critical information, and strengthen your brand identity.
This translates to a broad range of use cases and industries, including many that you might not initially expect.
Animated videos are well-established in consumer goods marketing, and it’s hard to imagine many iconic hospitality brands without animations. But, animation is also being used by healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotech brands, to deliver more refined, precise and clear communication.
With animated medical videos, medical brands can maximise patient understanding, and support medical professionals, by communicating treatments and processes to patients in a far more effective way.
How do animated medical videos enhance patient understanding?
With animated videos of any kind, animation allows organisations to communicate complex information in a more clear, supportive way.
In the case of animated medical videos, this unique medium enables medical professionals to explain a broad range of medical topics - spanning everything from how treatment works, to the purpose of key medical devices - using visual representations and a precise, carefully crafted script.
By combining an audio explanation with a detailed animated illustration of the topic, medical professionals can better explain the complex treatments they may be recommending, even to patients without any medical understanding at all.
Medical brands can create their own completely bespoke animations. Not only does this mean creating the video’s elements to support a specific message, but also tailoring the content to best suit the target audience.
For example, if you need to create an animation that illustrates how a drug works in the body, what audience are you targeting? What is their typical level of medical knowledge? How old are they? How much aftercare will they require? Will they be nervous about the procedure?
With a patient education animation, you can help patients understand exactly what needs to be done and how, and create a detailed video that leaves them feeling supported, reassured, informed and empowered.
How can animated videos improve patient recall of medical information?
It’s one thing to talk your patients through key medical information, it’s another to ensure they can recall this information, and continue following your guidance.
Maximising patient recall should form a core part of your comms strategy. In doing so, you can ensure patients understand the full nuance of the treatment, they feel confident and reassured, and they can continue following your guidance into the future, even after they have left your care.
During a course of treatments, patients will receive some form of document to help strengthen their recall (and emphasise key takeaway information). Typically, medical brands will provide this information in the form of leaflets, brochures or website links.
While these are certainly useful, there are major flaws to these approaches. Namely, they can make the information difficult for most patients to follow, and usually only achieve low levels of retention.
Instead, medical animation videos can significantly improve both a patient's understanding and their ability to recall what a health professional has previously explained.
Patient education animation videos are precisely engineered to foster high patient recall. In fact, the recall percentage improvement on information that has been delivered through animated videos can be as high as 72%.
In comparison, studies have shown that when reading text alone, audiences usually retain just 10% of the message.
As you can see, patient education animation is one of the most effective ways to strengthen patient recall and, when it comes to critical topics or services, boasts a fantastic return on your investment.
How do medical animations aid in explaining complex medical procedures?
Whatever the topic, animation allows you to convey the point in a clear, precise and accessible way.
In the healthcare industry, medical animation videos can support and simplify the way you communicate any concept, treatment or topic.
The benefits of using medical animation videos to support your explanations include:
- Providing patients with an effective educational tool
- Allowing patients to watch and rewatch the video in their own time
- Improving overall understanding
- Improving patients’ confidence in your services
- Ensuring patients have all the information they need
- Communicating in a way that is accessible for all patients
- Maximising audience engagement, and encouraging them to keep watching right the way through to the end
- Making content that can easily be repurposed, and republished across all your digital channels
- Standardising the way you deliver information
How can animations support healthcare professionals in delivering effective treatment?
These benefits and qualities mean that animations are ideally suited to helping healthcare professionals deliver a higher quality of service, and more effective treatments for their patients.
As part of their day to day roles, healthcare professionals have to continuously deliver explanations to patients.
This includes explaining treatments, operations and medications, plus standard procedures, protocols, recommendations and guidelines.
Not only is this a high volume of context for your teams to cover, but it is critical information with a lot of nuance and detail to be included.
So, after a healthcare professional has explained the process, they can follow it up with an animated video, sent directly to the patient.
Animations are a fantastic way to support your teams, and alleviate some of the burden that is placed on them when it comes to patient education.
By embedding medical animation videos within your patient communication process, you can ensure effective and consistent treatment is being delivered, while giving your teams peace of mind, knowing that their patients are receiving all the information and guidance that they need.
This saves considerable time for healthcare professionals, as they can spend less time on this aspect of aftercare, and can guide patients through the process of explanation to confirmation far more efficiently and smoothly.
Then from the perspective of the patients, giving them access to medical animation videos extends the support that your institution is providing, even while they are at home and have left your care.
By following up on your explanation with an animated video, patients can feel:
- Reassured that they understand the process
- Assured that they have the right information, readily accessible
- Supported throughout the entire process
- Confident, having been given all the required information, in an accessible way, which is easy to understand
- Comfortable giving the go-ahead
What role do medical animations play in improving overall patient satisfaction?
When animation is included in your patient communication, you can help your patients make decisions with confidence.
By enhancing patient education - and using animation to help patients understand the full treatment process - you can ensure your patients understand exactly what it is they’re committing to. So, when they agree to a treatment or service, you both know that they are doing so from an informed, secure and supported position.
When patients feel informed, healthcare professionals have patients who are:
- Less anxious
- Engaged
- More independent and self-managing
- Able to actively participate
- More likely to attend appointments, and adhere to their treatment programmes
- More compliant with attending follow-up sessions
- Able to communicate clearly
- Happier with the service they’re receiving
- Able to make confident decisions
- Informed about the process or procedure
- Understanding of the pre and post-treatment steps
- More trusting in your team
In short, by offering animation as part of your patient education resources, your patients will know exactly how the whole process works, allowing them to feel more relaxed and supported during all points of the process.
Last thoughts from us.
Patient education animation videos are an extremely effective way to improve treatment outcomes, and support your patients throughout their time with you.
They are a quick, simple, seamless and harmonious way to improve patient education, and give your patients an extra level of support.
Then, by improving patient education, the results can be seen across the board. You can instil greater confidence in your patients, make them feel far more supported and reassured, and help them to make informed decisions about their care, thereby markedly improving treatment outcomes.
Why work with an animation agency like OK Social?
OK Social is a motion design studio, offering comprehensive animation services to a wide range of global brands and industries.
We are renowned for our bold, creative approach, devising innovative and engaging animated elements that will keep your target audience hooked right through to the end.
At the same time, we work on a close one-to-one basis with all our clients. This ensures that all the animations we create are firmly on-brand, and achieve all of the client’s specific KPIs.
It’s for these reasons that we’re the trusted animation agency of some of the UK’s largest brands, including global healthcare leaders such as the NHS and Lloyds Pharmacy.
To find out more about our animation services, or if you have any questions about how patient education animation can improve your treatment outcomes, 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.
