How Can People Learn About Health Through Pictures?

At my current company, we spend a lot of time analyzing how to communicate with members. Typically, this means sending letters to patients reminding them to stay on their medications or highlighting savings if they switch treatments. Two innovators are taking a different approach to member education by literally illustrating their messages.

The first company, theVisualMD, recently introduced "The 9 Visual Rules of Wellness", a website that uses video and interactive displays to deliver wellness education. Each of the rules has a set of chapters that guide the audience through what healthy behaviors are and how to achieve them. As opposed to dull wellness sites that just tell you what to do, theVisualMD encourages better behavior by developing a narrative around what it takes to stay health and creating an interactive environment akin to walking through a museum (which isn’t all good – the website can feel academic at times). I like this conversational approach and can see user experience improvements making this more appealing in the future.

The second innovator is an MIT economist that wrote a graphic novel eschewing superheroes for healthcare reform. The book breaks down the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act into easy-to-digest pieces and eliminates some of the complexity around this policy. The author’s goal was to provide an honest assessment of the bill and help readers understand what it is and what it isn’t. I haven’t read the book, but I like the concept since learning about policy can feel overwhelming. By breaking it down into this format, people may be more willing to invest the time to understand this bill.

My struggle with these innovations is that they appeal to a narrow audience. theVisualMD requires time and commitment to scroll through the various chapters and, while the website is well constructed, it can feel too much like a textbook and turn people off. The graphic novel, while much more effective in communicating complex policy, runs the risk of oversimplifying the issue and turning people off with the format (i.e., will people take you seriously if you say you learned about the ACA through a comic book?). While both are very niche, I like the project goals – taking steps to simplify and demystify healthcare through a more visual experience. The question is how do we scale these ideas up to appeal to a wider audience?