Healthcare professionals can benefit greatly by engaging a video production company to create a patient case study video, a tool that can, at the same time, help in highlighting a particular type or form of medical treatment and show your organisation in a very empathetic light.
This type of video is one way to demonstrate successes, encourage patients to consider a consultation and to promote the organisation’s expertise to other health professionals for referrals. A patient case study video can be a lot less ‘salesy’ than a promotional video but deliver the same results. This type of video content can also help reduce stigma around particular illnesses, humanising the illness.
Healthcare video production is a growing area. Hospitals, medical centres, governments and not-for-profit groups are all starting to understand the ‘show, not tell’ method of marketing. A well-constructed video that tells a story will be a lot more engaging than a thousand words of text.
So how do you go about creating an engaging patient case study video?
The first, and probably most obvious, step is to decide what you want your video to achieve: Do you just want to tell the world about a brand-new treatment? Are you trying to raise awareness of a particular ailment? Perhaps you need to recruit new staff – you could use a patient case study as a recruitment video. Maybe you’re trying to raise money for your organisation.
At this point you should also be thinking about where your video is going to be seen. Is it for Facebook? Instagram? On your organisation’s website? Or perhaps even as a cinema advertisement.
It’s all about the people!
Once you’ve decided on what you’re trying to achieve with your video and what medium you will use, you need to consider who it’s going to feature. Who, in your patient list, has the best story, and would they be able to effectively put that story into words?
It is at this point that you might engage a video production company to help you focus on the right patient to tell the right story – what you will want the viewers to know.
You might interview the patient in person, or over Zoom, to ensure they know what information they will need to have in mind and to gauge whether they’re likely to be able to tell the story in an engaging way. You have a message to get across; you need that information to be clear and to be delivered in the most effective way.
You should also, at this point, think about whether one of the medical staff needs to be used in the story, to give your organisation’s perspective. This might work particularly well when your patient is a child, or is someone who might have difficulty telling the story.
Once you have your ‘talent’ in place, you might need to think about – as the real estate industry says – location, location, location; where are you going to film? We always try to film and interview patients in their homes, surrounded by photos and familiar things. This tends to be a much more engaging location than a hospital bed, but, of course, in some cases you might not have much choice.
If you film people in their homes you can also include some vision of them interacting with loved ones, their pets, having dinner or generally just living their life.
When filming any medical video production one thing to consider is how tired a patient might become during the filming process and, with this kind of content, it’s important to know that you won’t need to spend an extensive period of time with the patient.
The interview, and setting a context
By planning questions first, and working with a video producer to help work out what questions would get the best responses, you should be in a position to film a quick interview, maybe with between five and ten questions.
Questions asked in the video production process would focus on: what happened to the patient; what happened that they end up needing care; and how the organisation helped them with that care. It’s also always good to end with a look to the future, to have the patient talk about what’s next. A call to action might also work here to ask for donations if that is the purpose of your video.
You will also need to consider filming some additional content, sometimes called ‘b-roll’ or ‘overlay’. This helps to contexualise the story and to ‘colour in’ the words spoken in the interview. These shots are incredibly important, so make sure that you allow at least a couple of hours for this.
With the right planning, the whole filming part of the production process with the patient could be as little as half a day.
Photos might also help to show their life before the procedure or incident or to show when things were at their lowest. Photos shown in situ in a photo album or on the wall are often better than going full screen.
Bringing it all together
Editing and post-production are where your story comes together. Only choose the quotes that are important to the story and remember that not every bit of information needs to be in the video. Let the story breathe, use natural sound and find hope and light toward the end of the story when the beginning might have been hopeless and dark.
Take the viewer on a journey. It might only be a couple of minutes, but leave them with a feeling. The ideal is that the viewer might not be able to remember an exact shot or quote from the video, but they will remember how the video made them feel.
Engage us
The Jasper Picture Company is the premier video production company in Melbourne when it comes to healthcare videos. Contact us; we can – and will – help.
More information can be found on our healthcare video production page.