By Bethany Lowes Bush, Associate Director, at EatMoreFruit Communications
Most Healthcare professionals need 50 Continuous Professional Development (CPD) credits annually in the UK, and up to 150 Continuous Medical Education (CME) credits in some US specialties and CME cycles.
When done right, these sessions inspire new research and improve patient care.
Whether it’s new trial data, cutting-edge technology or devices, or better ways of working and workflows, medical education democratises best practices and access to effective care.
But let’s be honest – it can be a chore. Clinicians are stretched thin.
NHS waiting lists exceed 7.8 million cases. Resources for funded education are becoming more difficult to find, and industry-supported options can be overwhelming.
There are only so many webinars a clinician can sign up for.
How can HCPs maximise their limited time when it comes to CPD, and how do they prioritise one topic over another?
This is where we have an opportunity to sync our med ed with our marketing, and here we’re going to cover 3 ways to align it to 3 phases of the marketing funnel.
But first, compliance.
Medical education isn’t product marketing. When HCPs seek education, they need genuine learning opportunities, not 15 MOA slides.
Let’s respect that boundary while making education work harder for your brand and your marketing funnel:
- See, we mean awareness, views and engagement
- Think, how do we change hearts and minds?
- Do, what action are we driving and what does that look like when marketing and medical education meet?
See: Quick Knowledge Hits That Stick
Peer-to-peer education is nothing new. It’s always been a staple in medical education.
But with HCPs joining TikTok, BlueSky and Mastodon in waves, a new peer-to-peer format is emerging.
BlueSky includes a “starter pack” for HCPs, called #MedSky – a verified list of clinicians where you can ‘follow all’ to balance feeds…with less chance of giving a platform to medical misinformation.
One example from TikTok shows Dr Will Flanary, a.k.a @DrGlaucomflecken on TikTok, an ophthalmologist-cum-comedian.
Beth Lowes Bush
There is new trial data about using MRI in prostate diagnosis and he thinks medics should know about it.
There are posters, publications and congress talks, and now there are comedy skits that put the challenges around prostate cancer diagnosis into context for urologists, with his RCT main messages being the punchline in a shortform video.
In less than 2 minutes, this surgeon cuts through a TikTok feed and taps into human content consumption behaviour and finds a new pedagogy…memes.
People no longer learn in a vacuum, we save recipes, fashion, travel, parenting, DIY hacks from all over the internet, often when we’re not actively searching for it, and clinicians are the same.
Where we once limited RCT data videos to hour long webinars, or smartly polished explainers of results, we can take the lead from clinicians and make content in a way that flows with their carefully curated feeds.
Think: Walk in Their Shoes
Detail aids will always be a necessary tool in the sales and marketing toolbox for making the consideration phase turn into purchase.
But aids often lack the wider context and demonstrate the emotional understanding of a health condition, and when you’re in the room with clinicians, the sell is likely to be front and centre.
A Life in a Day, an immersive patient simulation, turns medical education on its head, and puts the clinician or sales team in the shoes of the patient to understand where lives are most affected by chronic conditions.
Using an app, actors, AR, and wearable technology, the learner immerses in a health condition for 24 hours.
More than 15,000 people working in the life sciences have gone through the patient experiences.
Participants report a 46 per cent increase in understanding and 92 per cent have made at least one tangible change to their roles to be more patient centric in their everyday responsibilities.
Personalised content builds deeper understanding.
The patient experiences show physical, social, and psychological challenges facing both healthcare professionals and patients, and combines education with authentic stories, interactivity, and empathy. It’s about making learning resonate with daily life and practice.
Do: Turn Learning into Action
Medical education comes in many forms, but lectures and seminars dominate despite only 1 in 3 physicians liking this style of learning.
4 in 5 say practical demonstrations are superior because it makes content easier to understand and allows for greater clarity.
While this study was done with medical students, it’s fair to assume that busy clinicians feel the same.
So how can we take practical demonstrations to the extreme? Gamification.
Gamified learning can increase engagement by up to 60 per cent and have a positive effect on knowledge retention which is what medical education is all about.
One team who are doing this with an innovative way of working is Ms Zobia Gundkalli and her team at Scrub Games, medical education themed escape rooms designed to work across multidisciplinary teams to put clinical practice, decision-making and communication and teamwork front and centre of the med ed agenda.
Designing a room that focused on incision management and preventing post-surgical complications after orthopaedic surgery, teams solved puzzles based on real clinical scenarios, translating guidelines into practice.
The group of orthopaedic surgeons admitted this style of learning could be a valuable tool for junior clinicians who feel less than confident about differing clinical guidance.
Some participants from previous surgical escape rooms say, “Trainees were enjoying the session but also genuinely took away important experience of team working under pressure and the human factors at play,” said a foundation Training Programme Director
“Traditional training tells teams what to do.
“Our escape rooms make them think through why,” explains Ms. Zobia Gundkalli, surgeon and co-founder of Scrub Games.
“When you combine competition with clinical problem-solving, participants learn and communicate in different ways to how they usually would… and it taps into the competitive nature that’s often common among health care professionals.”
The Marketing Opportunity
These new technologies confirm what forward-thinking brand managers already know:
- Educational and peer-to-peer content cuts through
- Interactive formats drive higher recall
- Education-engaged HCPs are more likely to adopt new technologies
Building Your Education Ecosystem
Smart med tech companies are creating learning journeys that align with their marketing funnels:
- Awareness: Quick-hit videos that tap into HCP social behaviours – think TikTok RCT summaries and #MedSky discussions
- Consideration: Immersive experiences like A Life in a Day that build empathy and deepen understanding
- Action: Interactive product engagement that turn learning into clinical practice change through competition and teamwork
The Bottom Line
Yes, medical education faces challenges. Time is scarce. Resources are tight. Information overload is real.
But by delivering genuine value through innovative formats that respect how HCPs actually learn and consume content, you’ll build trust, drive engagement, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.
More importantly, you’ll transform medical education from a box-ticking exercise into a powerful marketing asset that delivers real results for your brand.
The question isn’t whether to integrate medical education into your marketing strategy.
It’s how fast can you start?
Want to learn more, then get in touch with EatMoreFruit today.
