Education and Communication as a Catalyst for Technology Adoption

Today at The Civitas Networks for Health 2022 Annual Conference, a Collaboration with the DirectTrust Summit, I was fascinated by a session that looked at the importance of education and communication for healthcare organizations when it comes to encouraging adoption of technology.  For example, this has been an important effort by DirectTrust when it comes to educating users of how and when direct messaging could be used.  I was interested to hear what this panel had to say about their experience.

One thing that intrigued me about this panel is that none of the panelists had marketing or PR titles.  However, that’s exactly what they were doing. It illustrated first a lack of investment in marketing by many of them, but also how many of the people charged with marketing are also tasked with many other efforts as well.

The session started with this important question:

Their main answer to this question was this:

I think most in the industry agree that technology isn’t the problem anymore.

Then, they offered some ideas for how to communicate better.

It’s easy to think that everyone is like us. Doing marketing that understands them, looks like them, and speaks the way they expect is a powerfully important lesson here.

Very practical idea to move from fax to direct messaging.

Really cool example of simple efforts that can have a big impact. She also emphasized the need to keep it simple for their community.

Storytelling was highlighted as an important part of a successful communication plan. It’s amazing how quickly a visualization can tell a story as compared to text.

Liz Buckle added more color to this idea:

That can be a challenging gap to bridge, but it’s essential to good communication.

Listening is the key to finding good stories.

This last thought was a really powerful one when it comes to communication efforts:

It was clear that there was a real need for better marketing and communication for many of the projects HIEs were doing. It was nice to hear about some of the ideas that were working.  It’s easy to get so caught up in the data and technology and forget how important the right communication and marketing plan can be for the success of these organizations.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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