Perfecting the 1-minute update for frontline healthcare workers

Imagine that you’re a pediatrician in a children’s hospital. You’ve got less than a minute before the next task, the next family you need to consult with and the next sick kid you’ve got to help on the path to healing. If your internal emails can’t tell you what matters in that short window of time, it’s probably not going to get through to you at all.

Alison Zurcher, director of internal communications at Seattle Children’s Hospital, faces the challenge of getting messages through to medical professionals every day. Reaching frontline workers is challenging in any field, but in healthcare, the intensity is leveled up because every second matters.

“Any one of my peers in internal communications would tell you reaching the clinical side is the most challenging, because they’re busy doing their work,” Zurcher told Ragan. “They’re busy caring for patients. So how do you get that information to them quickly? How do you make sure it rises to the top when they only have a moment? That’s really the ongoing challenge.”

Zurcher said that the doctors and nurses at Seattle Children’s check email regularly as their main internal comms channel, but they do so quickly between their main responsibilities. That means internal communicators need to earn attention almost instantly.

“One of the misperceptions is that clinical workers don’t check their email during the day,” Zurcher said. “When we’ve done surveys, we found that’s not true. They really do. But they’re checking quickly, between tasks and between patients. That’s where things like the subject line, formatting and clarity become really important.”

To make the most impact in that small window of time, Zurcher and her team have developed a process to get the point across in less than a minute.

1. Start with one big idea that clinicians need to know

Zurcher said her team’s top priority when communicating with clinicians is simple: don’t bury the lede, especially during urgent situations.

“We’re pretty good about saying, ‘Let’s get to the point. Take out the fluff,’” she said. “If there’s a major outage, for example, it’s really one or two sentences and then, ‘We’ll keep you posted.’ We know that in emergent situations, especially, people need the information fast. They don’t need three paragraphs of setup before you tell them what’s actually happening.”

This same philosophy also informs how Zurcher puts together the hospital’s weekly provider updates. These messages are segmented by audience so clinicians can quickly scan and get to what’s relevant to them.

The content of these messages falls into a few primary areas:

• Policy updates
• Medication changes
• Workflow adjustments
• Key information clinical staff need to do their jobs on a given day

“We know providers don’t have time to read a long email during the day,” Zurcher said. “So we’re constantly asking ourselves: What is the thing they absolutely need to know right now to do their jobs well? If it’s not essential, it probably doesn’t belong in that communication.”

2. Make messages easy to scan and reinforce

Since frontline healthcare workers are so pressed for time, they’re not always going to read an internal comms message top to bottom. In short, formatting matters to grab attention fast.

“You use bullet points, you use bold, you think about what stands out visually,” Zurcher said. “We know people are scanning quickly, whether they’re looking on their phone or their computer, so you have to make it easy to pull out the important information immediately.”

That fact also forms Seattle Children’s channel strategy. Zurcher said concise written communication tends to outperform video in clinical environments where employees may not have the time or the speakers to watch and listen to internal comms content during the workday.

Zurcher added that digital signage is a helpful reinforcement tool for hospital workers.

“Digital signage is more of a nice-to-have than a need-to-have in a lot of instances,” she said. “But it augments your main pathway of communication. Something somebody sees on a screen in passing might point them to the intranet, or a website or a QR code to learn more later when they have more time.”

A few main tenets for comms pros to keep in mind when writing for scannability include:

• Short paragraphs
• Bulleted formats
• Bold typeface for deadlines, key actions and changes
• Frontloading important information at the top of a message
• Avoiding large text blocks
• Considering where and how people are getting the message (i.e. laptop or mobile)

“You have to make the important information stand out quickly,” Zurcher said. “If people have to hunt for the takeaway, you’ve probably already lost them.”

3. Make your subject line compelling

When you’ve got people checking your messaging between tasks at a hospital, the subject line carries a lot of weight as to whether a message gets read at all. Zurcher said her team rethought its approach to subject lines, and the retooling led to better engagement.

“We used to do something more generic, like the name of the newsletter and the date,” she said. “Then we started pulling out key pieces of information instead, and we saw our open rate improve by about 6%. The only thing we changed was the subject line.”

She added that instead of bland and formulaic headers, the team started writing subject lines more like news headlines that immediately communicated urgency, relevance or action.

“You get an email that says something like, ‘Please read this,’ and you probably think, well, that’s not helpful,” Zurcher said. “Really think about the words you’re using and how they’re going to appear when somebody’s quickly glancing at their phone or computer.”

Zurcher also said that subject lines need to answer one of four key questions:

• What changed?
• Who does this affect?
• Is action required?
• How urgent is this?

When you’re sending messages to healthcare workers, you’re competing with patient needs and constant interruptions. The comms pros that break through are the ones that know how to be clear and concise.

“You have to think about how your message rises to the top when people are busy,” Zurcher said. “People are caring for patients and doing really important work, so respecting their time really matters.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.