3D animation is playing an increasingly important role in the healthcare industry, and 2018 is poised to be its biggest year yet. More and more medical professionals are realizing the benefits that 3D medical animation can bring in the areas of education, marketing and patient communication.
Improving technology has also played a critical part in the growing prevalence of medical animation videos. Becuase of these technical advances, it’s now easier and more cost-effective than ever to obtain high-quality animations to explain complex healthcare-related topics.
Medical animation is expected to continue to gain popularity beyond 2018 as well, as technology continues to enable new applications. Grand View Research has forecasted that the global market for medical animation will expand to a value of $514 million USD by 2024.
3D animation is providing value to the healthcare field in a variety of ways, and many of these benefits have only recently been realized. Here’s how this technology is positively impacting the medical field in 2018 and beyond.
One of the many ways in which medical professionals can use 3D medical animations is to enhance their communications with patients.
In fact, animations can convey important information before they even see their doctor for the first time. Many patients start their search for medical help online. By uploading 3D animation to their websites, medical institutions can help prospective patients better understand their medical conditions, the medicines they may need to take or the procedures they may undergo. This helps patients go into an appointment feeling better prepared.
Once the patient has visited a medical facility, they may benefit further from the use of medical animations. Most patients don’t have an extensive medical background, so explaining their condition to them can be a challenge to medical professionals. Sometimes, however, it is important for the patient’s health that they understand.
While animations should not completely replace person-to-person communication in a medical setting, it may augment the medical professional’s communications and help them explain certain conditions, drugs, procedures or devices.
Studies have revealed that around 65 percent of us are visual learners. So, presenting information in a visual format can help promote understanding and recall. Studies also show that people remember 80 percent of what they see versus just 10 percent of what they hear.
Visuals are especially useful when it comes to complex topics. Medical issues tend to be confusing, especially if you don’t have a medical background. It’s easy for things to get lost when explaining such a matter orally. With visuals, patients have a better reference point for what their doctor or nurse is trying to explain to them.
Animation also has various capabilities that other forms of visual communication do not. Unlike illustrations or photographs, animation enables you to show movement which you can slow down, speed up and adjust in whatever way you need to.
You can also do things with animation that you can’t do with a video. Animation scenes feature flawless quality at all times, even in conditions where it would be difficult or impossible to shoot high-quality video. You can also show things that video couldn’t catch. For instance, you can zoom down to the molecular level, deconstruct a device to show how it works from the inside or create any hypothetical scenario. With animations, the only limit is your creativity.
Many patients may also not want to see footage of a real medical procedure. With animation, you can show them what they need to see to understand the process without the parts that would make them feel uncomfortable.
Just as medical animations are effective tools for educating patients, they can also play a role in the education of medical professionals at all levels as well as the training of new employees.
Educators can use this tool to explain a broad range of topics to students. It’s useful for explaining topics such as the anatomy of the human body, the processes that occur in a healthy person, and the effects of a disease on a person’s body. It can also provide a visual demonstration of a drug’s mechanism of action, or how it affects the body and produces a response, so that they can better understand how the medication works.
It also gives students an opportunity to see in detail how to perform a surgery or another medical procedure or how to use a certain medical device. This is important because, with many procedures, medical professionals need to have an in-depth understanding of them before they perform them. As compared with standard surgical videos, dynamic 3D video results in 19 percent higher comprehension.
Additionally, animation may help to improve training and speed onboarding of new hires at medical facilities. Animation lends itself to e-learning, so new hires can conduct their training any time and anywhere. Employers can also make these resources available to staff at any time so they can review any time they feel they need to.
In all of these scenarios, 3D animation can help improve retention of important information and depth of understanding for students. It enables educators to show visual explanations in great detail of many different kinds of topics that would otherwise be difficult to explain visually.
Marketing comes along with unique challenges in the medical field. The information you need to present can sometimes be dry and technical, making it difficult to hold audiences’ attention. Patients and investors also often lack technical knowledge and an in-depth medical background. Doctors and other medical professionals are also very busy, meaning presentations must be succinct. 3D animation can help alleviate all of these difficulties.
Medical and pharmaceutical companies frequently use animation when marketing to patients directly. When the average consumer thinks about animation in relation to these companies, the first thing that comes to mind is often animated characters from commercials for medications. Marketers are increasingly using these animated mascots to promote treatments. While they don’t explain any complex medical topics, they’re very effective at improving brand recognition and association.
Marketers are also increasingly using more complex animations in their commercials to show how a drug or medical device works. These companies might also place more in-depth animated videos on their websites for consumers who are truly interested. Potential patients can view this media at any time to become better informed.
They may be more likely to view these animations than to read information because the visually presented information takes less effort to absorb. People may also share high-quality animated videos on social media or with friends if they feel it gave them valuable information.
When presenting to potential investors, representatives of medical and pharmaceutical companies are faced with a similar situation. The investors may not have a medical background, yet the representatives need them to understand the product so that they will invest in it.
Using animations in these investor presentations can make it easier for investors to understand the drug or medical device. It’ll also likely be easier for them to stay focused on the presentation, since animations help keep people interested and even entertained. The presentations may also go faster, since you can pack a lot of information into an animation — much more than you can fit into a purely oral presentation of equal length.
According to Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. 3D animations may be worth even more.
When marketing or making a sales visit to medical professionals, companies don’t have to worry as much about technical understanding because of the audiences’ medical background. They do need their presentations to be succinct, however, while still providing enough information.
As mentioned earlier, you can fit a lot of information into a relatively short animation, making them the perfect medium for these kinds of presentations. In fact, people can absorb the information presented via 3D media 60,000 times faster than they can process text-based information.
Salespeople don’t even necessarily have to present these videos to medical professionals in-person. They can send them the animations through email and follow up with a phone call after the doctor has viewed the animations. Medical professionals can even do their own research if the company uploaded their animations on their website.
3D animations can provide many benefits across various parts of the medical field. Some of these benefits include:
3D animations enable you to explain complex topics in a relatively short amount of time, since you can provide detailed visual representations. This is one reason animation is so useful in the medical field. The topics that one needs to explain are often technically complex. Because most people are visual learners, they are more likely to comprehend something if they see it in a detailed visual format like 3D animation.
With animation, you can show things that you couldn’t otherwise provide a visual explanation of. The content of the video doesn’t have to be limited to what the human eye can see or the way we view objects in the real world. For example, you can show the mechanism of action of a drug or show a cross-section of a medical device and rotate that cross-section to show it from different angles. You can zoom down to the microscopic level, pan out to explain broad trends or even create unique animated characters. There are very few limits to what you can create with 3D animation.
It tends to be easier to keep people’s interest with visual content, and 3D animations can be especially entertaining because of their dynamic and captivating nature. People also pay more attention when they understand something, which animation helps with as well. This enhanced engagement helps improve students’ learning outcomes and helps patients become more actively involved in their health.
People remember more when they learn visually. With the amount of detail you can fit into 3D animations, you can help people remember even more than with other types of visual media. Brands have also had great success with using animation to promote brand recognition, further demonstrating that what people learn through animation sticks in the mind.
3D animations are suitable for a wide range of people, including those with and without medical backgrounds. While people who aren’t medical professionals may feel uneasy viewing actual footage of medical procedures, 3D animation allows them to view them without the aspects that would make them uncomfortable. You can even use this type of media with children to explain medical topics. Additionally, you can also make the visuals as technically complex as need be based on the audiences’ level of expertise.
Using high-quality animation in your marketing and animations has a “wow” factor to it. It makes your production look more professional and reliable and can impress potential clients, investors and other stakeholders.
3D animation is becoming increasingly prevalent in the healthcare field, as it is in other industries. As compared to a few years ago, the technology involved has improved dramatically, enabling medical professionals to explain complex topics more easily. Moving beyond 2018, the current benefits of 3D animations will continue to improve.
One change we can expect to see is more interactivity with the animations. With interactive 3D, the user can control the animation. They can click on different parts of the animation to learn more about them, move at their own pace or even move about in 3D space. This makes education using this type of media more interactive.
An even more immersive type of animation technology we will see more of in the future is virtual reality. VR technology makes the user feel as though they are in the animation because it is so realistic and immersive. Using this technology, surgeons could practice performing operations, allowing them to improve their skills substantially before they enter the operating room.
Technological advancements such as these will make medical 3D animation even more useful in the healthcare sector of the future. This is another reason it makes sense to start using animation today.
Luckily, you don’t necessarily need to know anything about animation to start using this technology at your medical institution. Instead, you can work with Ghost Productions, the premier medical animation and interactive media creation team. We’re animation experts who specialize in producing medically accurate animations, and we’ve been doing so since 1994. We make it easy to get started with our medical animation services even if you’ve never dealt with this type of project before.
To get a better idea of what we do, explore our media library featuring some of our past work. You can also get in contact with us to talk about your creative vision.
Ghost Productions is an award-winning medical media production company that can help you with custom medical animation and marketing services. We offer a wide array of digital representation services that can help anyone in the medical field improve their marketing, support patient communication efforts, or even streamline staff training. Our team is highly trained and has a great understanding of biomedical processes, so they can accurately represent your device or product in a 3D medical animation, or other types of illustrations you may be interested in. Contact Ghost Productions now and tell us more about how we can help you train your surgeons, sell more medical devices, or explain your pharmaceutical product.
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