Thanks for your interest in my "Trade Secrets"--resources I use every day to help my clients reach their target audiences with clear communication. I appreciate those who shared many of these with me, and I'm happy to share all of them with you. If you have resources you rely on to help you with clear communications, send them my way and I'll post them here.
Online pronunciation dictionary: www.HowJSay.com—an audio and phonetic guide for difficult words, to share with your staff and patients. Good for voiceover and on-camera talent for videos and podcasts, too.
Medline Plus from the National Institutes of Health—simpler definitions of complex medical terms, plus videos and other guides—for your webpages, brochures and other patient communications.
Go 4 Life website for health messages for the baby boomers in your market. Great PDFs, webpages and downloadable videos from the National Institute on Aging that cover common health issues people over age 50.
Searchable database of current medical research: www.ScienceDaily.com. To bolster and clarify your health messages, here you can find hard evidence from leading medical journals and academic medical centers.
A complete “how-to” guide to communicating health and financial issues so that the lay-public will understand: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/. Designed for government communication but helpful for all communicators. (From the top menu bar, choose either "health literacy" or "financial.")
Descriptions of common lab tests, so your patients will understand what tests and screenings do, what to expect and what examps mean.
To find videos to liven up presentations and websites, search YouTube for the topic or search the web for "video" plus ".gov" or relevant keywords.
Physician Practice Marketing & Promotion
From a SHSMD webinar I created with Eric Fletcher, this overview covers basic information and concepts about physicain-practice marketing/promotion (things you know, but docs and office managers might not). So it’s pretty timeless. The actual webinar isn’t available, but the PowerPoint download is.We also have a companion workbook, as well.
--a brief downloadable worksheet from my presentation at the International Conference of the Health & Science Communications Association, Rhode Island.
Overview: When trying to reach non-clinical audiences with clinical information, it's easy to focus on what we need to say, instead of on what our audiences need to hear. But a different approach will improve our audiences’ “health literacy,” and provide opportunities for our health communications to educate and inspire.
As P.T. Barnum famously said: "Give 'em what they want!" To do that, think of each message as a form of education, and maximize the means (print, web, video, graphics, etc.) to communicate what each audience wants and the way each wants to “consume” it.