By: Anne Stefanyk, Kanopi Studios
This guest blog is contributed by Kanopi Studios, a woman-run web agency that designs, builds, and supports mission-focused websites for organizations across the United States and Canada.
As a medical marketing professional, your job is to make complex, often confusing healthcare information easily understandable for your organization’s patients. Empowering patients with the information they need to make well-informed healthcare decisions is crucial to their long-term well-being.
However, only 12% of Americans possess proficient health literacy skills, making it absolutely critical to communicate clearly and eliminate accessibility barriers for patients. That’s why we created this guide to explore best practices for improving the patient experience by ensuring your online content is clear and inclusive for all website visitors.
Let’s get started by discussing why clear, jargon-free language is so essential for healthcare websites.
1. Understand the importance of clear and inclusive language.
Streamlined communication lays the foundation for strong patient engagement and trust. When website visitors encounter overly technical terms, they are more likely to disengage, feel intimidated, or misunderstand crucial health information.
A Sage Journals survey of 205 adults found that 9 out of 10 preferred a doctor who did not use medical jargon to one who did. Participants had a negative view of the jargon-using doctor, describing them as “cold,” “condescending,” and “difficult to understand.” Meanwhile, the doctor who communicated plainly, without using medical jargon, was more positively received, with participants describing them as “empathetic,” “approachable,” and “a good communicator.”
Additionally, vague or confusing language can obscure the value you provide, hindering audience connections. A recent JAMA study highlighted this disconnect, finding that while most patients (80%) recognized that an “unremarkable” chest radiography was good news, only 21% of participants correctly understood that a clinician saying their radiography was “impressive” was generally bad news.
As you can see, writing clear and accessible web content is crucial to retaining patients and providing them with a compassionate experience. Simplicity, empathy, and accessibility should be core components of your online messaging strategy.
2. Know your audience.
Clear web copy serves multiple healthcare audiences. It empowers:
- Patients and their families: When people with complex conditions and their families fully understand the medical issue they’re facing, they can make informed decisions about their care and treatment, creating a personalized experience that meets their individual needs. Because patients are your largest online audience, Kanopi Studios’ hospital web design guide recommends “keeping patient-centered content at the forefront of your site and content intended for healthcare professionals in a lesser position.”
- Healthcare partners: Jargon-free website content fosters confidence among other healthcare providers seeking reliable resources. For example, providers may use your website to understand your services when making referrals.
- Potential healthcare donors and funders: As Double the Donation’s healthcare fundraising guide points out, “often, potential donors have preconceived notions or misunderstandings about the services healthcare organizations provide.” When you can clearly articulate your mission and impact to potential funders, donors, and partners, you make a stronger case for support.
Take an empathetic stance to understand where your audience is coming from when they access your website. For instance, maybe a new patient is full of anxiety and worry, wanting to find your appointment portal as quickly and easily as possible. A potential donor may want to find meaning and connection with your organization to determine if you’re the best fit for their philanthropic contributions.
With this information in mind, design your website’s content to facilitate a smooth user experience that leverages accessible language to guide visitors toward their intended actions. Use straightforward calls to action, such as “Make an appointment” or “Give today,” to reassure visitors that they’ve come to the right place to address their needs.
3. Meet your website users where they are.
Translating medical terminology requires a commitment to empathy and simplicity. The goal is not to “dumb down” information but to make it accessible.
For instance, instead of saying a patient has “peripheral neuropathy,” you could explain it as “nerve damage in the feet and legs that can cause tingling, numbness, or weakness.” Similarly, you may describe a diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) as “an open sore on the foot that can be slow to heal for people with complex diabetes.” This approach demystifies each condition, instead focusing on the patient’s experience.
4. Utilize AI to ensure the copy is clear and easy to understand.
AI content solutions can help you identify where your content falls short in terms of accessibility and simplicity. Use generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, to assess your content’s readability and pinpoint areas where you can simplify overly complex language. Some healthcare content management systems use plugins or modules that enable you to integrate AI directly into your website to assess your content.
You’ll get the most use out of AI content support tools when you know the right prompts to use. Choose from these examples to help get started:
- For readability and simplicity:
- “Rewrite the following text for a 7th-grade reading level, without losing the core medical meaning: [Insert complex medical paragraph here].”
- “Analyze this paragraph and replace medical jargon with patient-friendly alternatives: [Insert text].”
- For generating analogies:
- “Create a simple, relatable analogy to explain how at-home foot temperature monitoring works to prevent a diabetic foot ulcer.”
- For structuring information:
- “Take this block of text about diabetic foot care and organize it into a numbered list of simple, actionable steps a patient should take every day.”
Keep in mind that AI is a starting point, not a final product. AI can act as an initial jargon detector, a simplification engine, and an analogy generator, but it requires a human expert to effectively guide its operation.
All AI-generated copy must be reviewed by a subject matter expert (SME)—such as a clinician or medical writer—to ensure 100% accuracy, empathy, and adherence to your brand voice. This is a non-negotiable step in healthcare communications.
5. Ask for stakeholder feedback.
Both internal stakeholders (healthcare staff, administrative team members, and volunteers) and external stakeholders (patients, caregivers, donors, and healthcare partners) should play a significant role in simplifying and streamlining your organization’s online content. Collecting their feedback helps you build stronger stakeholder relationships and makes your site a more helpful resource.
Start gathering audience input by taking these steps:
- Incorporate simple feedback tools into your website. Embed on-page widgets or simple forms at the end of blog articles and other educational resources, with questions like, “Was this information clear?” or “Is there anything on this page you found confusing?”
- Conduct user testing. Recruit a few volunteers to test your website for readability and usability. This process involves giving a patient or caregiver a task (e.g., “Find out what you should do if you have a foot blister”) and observing them as they navigate the site. Their questions and points of confusion are a goldmine of insight.
- Create a patient and family advisory council (PFAC). For a more sophisticated feedback approach, consider creating a small, formal group comprising patients, caregivers, and community volunteers who can periodically review new content before it goes live.
- Listen to frontline staff. Your organization’s nurses, medical assistants, and reception staff hear patients’ questions every day. They often know exactly where common points of confusion stem from and can be an invaluable internal resource for feedback.
Show stakeholders that you value their input by acting on it whenever possible. For example, let’s say patients note that some entries in your digital glossary of diseases and conditions contain confusing definitions. Update your glossary entries to ensure logical flow and simplified readability. Then, notify stakeholders when the revised versions are available on your website.
Your underlying care and compassion for patients should extend to every aspect of your communications, including the copy on your website. By prioritizing simple, easy-to-understand language on your website, you can make healthcare information more accessible and empower patients to make informed decisions about their medical care. Review your website today to ensure your patient-centered values are reflected in your language.
