The Changing Healthcare Communications Landscape
Posted on Nov. 9, 2021 / Subscribe 0
The Changing Healthcare Communications Landscape
In many ways, the past two years have felt like a decade. Our society is different, our work is different, and our day-to-day lives are different. In the world of both internal and external communications, practitioners have seen their roles evolve and may continue to do so as we move toward a future where COVID isn’t so central to the everyday lives of healthcare communicators. Reflecting on the past two years, here a few ways I believe the healthcare landscape has changed:
Communicating About A Common Issue Across Different Disciplines
The focus and role of one practitioner may vary greatly in comparison to another, even when the two share an industry. But, COVID has presented a common issue that permeates almost all facets of the healthcare landscape. If you were doing media relations around neurological brain issues in the past, it’s likely you’ve been doing more stories in recent memory that are tied to the cognitive effects COVID can have upon a person. If part of your role focuses on writing blogs about common health questions that consumers are interested in, I’m willing to bet you’ve written more than a few COVID-focused blogs, and significantly less time writing about the topics you may have more frequently touched on in the past. That’s not to say COVID is the only thing communicators have been focused on, but it seems to be the issue that today is tied into everything in one way or another.
The Fatigue Of Battling Fatigue
The best way to drive a message home is through targeted outreach and repetition, but too much repetition can cause fatigue among the recipients of the message. In the era of COVID, it’s perhaps more important than ever to provide factual, up-to-date information, especially as misinformation abounds on social media. Battling misinformation takes diligent work on the part of communicators, but message recipients can start to tune out after a while. This is one of the reasons why it’s all the more important to find attention-grabbing methods of storytelling when trying to communicate reliable and factual information related to COVID. Looking back on my career thus far, I can’t recall a time when driving home information on a singular topic has been more important, but at times also more daunting, than it is today.
Media Interviews In Our Virtual World
Throughout much of last year, media and healthcare communicators suddenly found themselves connecting virtually instead of the much more common practice of in-person interviews in the pre-COVID world. This shift to virtual has created some opportunities, which I’m sure many practitioners have already taken advantage of. Now, if you have someone with a great story but they are far away, it’s less of a hurdle to coordinate an interview. With the vast majority of reporters and news outlets now conducting interviews remotely, physical distance often isn’t the challenge it was in the days before COVID. Another benefit is being able to pull a story together quickly. If a reporter needs to speak with someone very soon, but your subject matter expert only has a brief window of availability between meetings, that’s probably not as big of an issue anymore. No need to worry about the reporter getting onsite within the narrow window – you can quickly set up a virtual interview.
These are a few ways I’ve noticed the healthcare landscape has changed, and there are far too many others to create a comprehensive list. I’d like to acknowledge my fellow healthcare communications pros who have worked diligently over the past couple years to ensure people have access to reliable and accurate information related to COVID, as well as my fellow non-healthcare pros who have perhaps stepped outside of their traditional roles to do the same. As we see 2021 coming to a close, I am optimistic about the year to come and hope everyone stays safe as we move to put COVID behind us.
Jeff Adkins is a senior public relations specialist with Henry Ford Health System and a PRSA Detroit board member/programming committee chair.
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