Hospital Video Production
This is true across the board, but can be especially relevant for doctors, hospitals and medical providers. Video is a superb tool not only for marketing your services, but also conveying your professionalism and quality and, most importantly, improving your patients’ experiences and outcomes.
Getting started can be a daunting task for private practitioners and even some in-house marketing departments of hospitals, so I've put together this guide for healthcare providers that want to boost overall marketing plans with a great video. If you’re a marketing coordinator or manager at a hospital, please feel free to use this guide to help your department get started with video or find ways to improve your video marketing efforts.
If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me!
Healthcare Video Strategy
Before we get to some video ideas, it's important to first understand why a patient would need care. By doing this, we can create objectives that our videos need to speak to. Typically, healthcare can be divided into three categories:
Emergency Care
Emergency care involves care that is unexpected. Two places for this would be the casualty or department of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). For emergencies, patients will almost always go to what is closest. For urgent care, patients often have no time to decide and will go to someone they trust. You can use videos to help build trust and create awareness of your emergency and walk-in services.
Elective Care
Elective care includes procedures like knee replacements. Patients seeking elective care will often take their time researching their options, which makes video extremely effective in marketing your elective care services and communicating their quality. By integrating video into your marketing services, you can build the trust, awareness and reputation to help someone make a decision.
Preventive Care
Preventive care includes care like annual health check-ups and screenings. Patients in this category are often looking for a provider that makes them feel safe and comfortable. Video can help create trust with your patients by introducing physicians, pathologists, radiologists and “humanizing” them. You can also use video to encourage patients to attend annual cancer screenings such as mammograms.
Healthcare Video Marketing Objectives
In a traditional business, the marketing objective is almost always to increase sales. You usually do this indirectly by focusing on key customer motivators you identify in your customer profiling. Healthcare marketing is different.
Having previously served at key administrative positions in various hospitals, I can distinctly pinpoint three essential goals that videos should address for healthcare organizations.
Build Patient Trust
Create Awareness
Improve Patient Experience
Video is fantastic at achieving all three of these objectives:
You can build trust by demonstrating your expertise and showing the outcomes of your patients.
Video creates awareness by leveraging the power of social media and local TV.
You can improve your patients’ experiences through educational and instructional videos.
By first identifying these objectives we can better plan our video messaging.
Video Ideas for Healthcare Providers
I’ve put together the following list of 11 video ideas for doctors, hospitals and medical providers. Use this list to help your marketing team get started with video.
Need some help formulating a videos? Feel free to connect with me. As a doctor-turned-filmmaker, I specialize in healthcare and would love to offer consulting and full production services for doctors, hospitals, and medical providers.
1. Meet the Doctor Videos
Meet-the-doctor videos are a great way to get started with video marketing. They help build patient trust and create awareness of your services and are relatively easy to make.
These videos are usually filmed interview style. During the interview, the doctors describes who they are, why they went into medicine, their expertise and why they love caring for patients.
When on boarding new physicians, surgeons etc at a hospital, ‘Meet-the-doctor videos’ also are a great way to introduce new doctors to the community. I recommend their creation in conjunction with the on boarding process. When completed, doctors, hospitals and medical providers can use these videos on their websites, social media and in waiting rooms with TVs.
2. Patient Education Videos
Patient-education videos should also be a big focus of your medical marketing efforts. Patient education video topics vary greatly but usually focus on encouraging patients to be more proactive in their own care and giving them the information they need to do so. These videos can be filmed interview style, like meet-the-doctor videos, or created using graphics and animation.
I recommend filming patient education videos the same time you film meet-the-doctor video, but instead of asking the doctor to talk about themselves, ask them to explain a specific topic in their area of expertise.
The video above, which helps educate patients on the risks of delaying medical care, is a great example of a patient-education video from the Mayo Clinic. Examples of other ideas for patient education include:
The difference between Type 1 vs. Type 2 diabetes.
Sun safety tips for avoiding skin damage and skin cancer.
How to recognize a stroke.
There really is no limit to the amount of patient education videos you can make.
3. Wellness & Nutrition Videos
Wellness and nutrition videos go along with patient-education videos. Doctors, hospitals, nutritionists and medical providers can create a series of healthy recipes to try out, for example. Back when I was practicing medicine and venturing into filmmaking, I created a series of healthy recipe videos myself. Or you could create videos encouraging patients to get more exercise and live an active lifestyle. Regardless of topic or idea, videos like this are an important complement and supplement to your overall marketing strategy.
4. Patient Testimonials
Patient-testimonial videos should be a priority for all doctors, hospitals and medical providers. It's a great way to highlight certain service lines and bring attention to the quality of your care. In addition, patient success stories act as social proof and can be critical in a patient's decision for their care.
The above example is a patient story created for Holland Hospital. The video shares Kirt's story of how he is back to life after two knee replacements.
Patient success stories perform very well on social media and service-line landing pages. Feel free to connect with me if you are part of the in-house marketing team at a hospital or medical provider looking to create high-quality patient testimonials.
5. Surgery & Procedure Prep Videos
You can also use video to help educate patients about their upcoming procedures, such as a knee replacement, hemorrhoidectomy, phacoemulsification or child birth. These videos typically provide a step-by-step walkthrough of what will happen and how one should prepare. Videos like this do a great job of improving the patient experience and developing patient trust.
The video above explains step by step how a surgery is planned and carried out for a patient. These kinds of videos are also frequently used by birthing centers to provide expecting parents with all the information they need before giving birth at the center. Check this video example about pre-operative C-Section by Regina General Hospital . If your hospital or medical organization is looking for a videos like these, fell free to connect with me !
6. Instructional Videos
One of the often-neglected aspects in healthcare facilities is "patient flow." Patient flow encompasses all the stages a patient experiences during their journey in a medical facility, from arriving at the facility to to their departure. While healthcare facilities create patient flow charts to outline the necessary processes, and resources for a smooth journey, they often struggle to achieve success in its execution.
Instructional videos are very straightforward videos that aim to improve the patient experience. For example, instructional videos can tell patients where to park or how to access the patient portal. Keep these videos simple – often a voice over with some corresponding footage is all you need – and include them in any email communications to patients
7. Service Line Videos
Service-line videos are high-level videos that describe the services of a particular service line, such as your orthopedics or cardiology department. Service-line videos are generally run as advertisements on local cable TV and digital advertising platforms.
While the above video follows a standard informative format and may also include voice overs occasionally, check out this video example from Ascension Health with Peyton Manning. It combines humor and highlights the pediatrics department quality, offering an alternative to the standard informational format. If you're interested in exploring more creative options in service-line overview videos, let's connect!
8. Promotional Advertisements
TV and digital ads offer doctors and hospitals ample chances to reach potential patients. These promotional videos can spotlight you or your hospital, showcasing specific services with a polished, emotionally compelling approach. They can have a more positive impact without patients feeling like they're being sold to, ultimately contributing to an overall positive brand image.
I really admire the Max Hospital commercial. It subtly shows that Max Hospitals have a top-notch EMS department, prioritize patient health over paperwork, and ensure assistance for patients' families. It subtly portrays the hospitals' excellent, easily accessible, and patient-friendly operations, demonstrating that even a vulnerable elderly man can navigate an emergency situation. All of this is skillfully woven into a heartwarming love story between the elderly couple, revealing the strong bond between the hospital staff and patients.
9. Short Docu-Fiction Videos
I love these videos the most because they're real stories. They mix documentary-style storytelling with a touch of fiction to reveal the healthcare world's challenges, victories, and human tales. They provide a special and emotional look at how doctors and hospital staff connect with patients.
10. 3D Surgical Videos
3D surgical videos are animated videos that explain how a surgery works. These help educate patients on how the surgery will happen and what they can expect. Typically these videos would not be used in outbound marketing efforts and are more reserved for specific patients.
11. Community Outreach Videos
Being active in the community is extremely important for doctors, hospitals and medical providers. This builds trust with patients and helps create awareness of your services. Videos of community outreach events, like medical camps, staff volunteering at an event or a fundraiser, are great opportunities to highlight the events and motivate people to attend next year.
Where Can Healthcare Providers Use Videos
The other side of video marketing, once they’re created, is using them. How will they be seen? By whom? When? Where? Answering these questions is just as important as the production of the video, so be sure to take time to create and implement a plan for distributing your videos.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google.
I recommend doctors/ hospitals use YouTube for your primary video player. First upload the video to YouTube and then embed that player onto your website. You can embed videos on landing pages, About Us pages and places like the patient portal. A rule of thumb is the more you can use video, the better your ROI and results will be.
In addition to serving as a video-hosting platform, YouTube videos can rank in search queries if they are well made and informative. You might find this as an effective way to attract new patients for specialized services like knee replacements or cancer care.
Almost all of your videos should go on social media.
In addition to YouTube, upload your videos directly to each social media platform. Facebook particularly does well with an older demographic, so you can get great engagement with your community by focusing on Facebook. LinkedIn should be where you promote recruitment videos, as well.
Video works great in waiting rooms.
There’s often a TV in your clinic/ hospital’s waiting room. This is a great place to screen the meet-the-doctor videos, which can help first-time patients feel comfortable before their appointments.
Healthcare Video Production
I hope this guide was valuable to you, and I invite you to return to it often. If you have any questions about any of the information here, please feel free to reach out to me! If your hospital or medical practice needs help with video marketing, I can offer consulting and full video production services.
If you enjoyed this content, I encourage you to check out my upcoming blogs. As part of my ongoing content marketing strategy, I'll be creating content to educate marketers and business owners on the best ways to use video. Thanks for reading.
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