As a copywriter who specializes in healthcare, I’ve written a lot of success stories featuring a patient. From futuristic neurosurgical techniques that seem like they should be impossible, to a child recovering from severe illness who redefines my understanding of the word “fighter,” I never get tired of writing them.
Hospitals and health systems have an ongoing appetite for patient stories, and it’s easy to see why. Done right, patient stories are engaging, humanizing the organization and lifting up the best healthcare has to offer. And the stories themselves are the stuff of movie scripts: a miracle save, a race against time, an underdog who overcomes all obstacles to walk out the hospital doors.
Reading a story like this should leave us with a sense of wonder. We’ve gotten a glimpse of a journey through challenging circumstances to a happy ending on the other side. That emotional connection is what people remember after they put the article down, and that’s what we strive to create.
3 Ways to Write a Better Patient Story
Step 1: Listen for the win
If you or someone you love has ever faced a serious medical condition, you know how personal that experience is – how significant those moments were to you. That’s why when I contact a patient for an interview, the foremost thing on my mind is their generosity. They’ve had a potentially frightening, painful experience, and they are willing to share it.
The best way to respect that gift is to listen. Being able to build rapport over the phone in less than a minute is an indispensable skill for writing patient stories. To help make the patient feel good about opening up to me, I let the interviewee set the pace. I usually start these conversations with something broad like, “So, tell me what happened.”
Step 2: Story, story, story
Have you ever read a patient story that is little more than a thinly veiled commercial for the hospital? I sure have. The patient’s experience feels like a marketing device, thrown in at the beginning and the end. The resulting article is not only unsatisfying to read, but it also doesn’t achieve the hospital’s goal, because the reader sees right through the trick.
At the same time, the patient story does need to promote the hospital’s work. That’s why it’s there in the first place. The solution for me is to think of the piece first as a narrative, not as marketing copy. The subtle differences in approach that separate narrative from persuasive writing are too many and varied to go into here, but overall, using the storyteller’s toolbox helps me craft an engaging result.
Step 3: Assemble the puzzle
At the end of the process, writing a patient story feels like a puzzle. Figuring out how to structure the lead, where to work in quotations, and how to explain the basics of, say, proton therapy so that the reader can appreciate its significance – all of these elements need precise alignment. This is also where I make sure the piece achieves the hospital’s promotional goals.
For hospital marketers, patients who are willing to share their experiences with your organization are worth their weight in gold. Taking a patient-centered, narrative-based, audience-focused approach is the key to making sure that these amazing stories actually get read.
About the author:
Freelance healthcare copywriter and content strategist Loren M. Blinde, PhD left the ivory tower of academia in 2008 to help people and organizations energize their writing. Combining the writing and research expertise of a college English professor with the marketing savvy of a creative entrepreneur, Loren and the team at Writing Power craft audience-driven copy that gets results for clients. Connect with Loren on LinkedIn.