Structuring a Healthcare Presentation: Inform, Persuade, or Recommend?

There are many reasons you might be preparing a healthcare presentation. The presentation may be a review of a recent trial, a new technology or tool, or about the operations of a hospital. Whatever your topic is, you’ll most likely be trying to inform, persuade, or recommend. There are specific ways in which you can structure the presentation to make it more meaningful for your audience.

Informing Your Audience

In this type of presentation, you will be showing a lot of data and interpretation of that data. A three part structure serves this type of presentation well:

• Define the problem that your data is informing you and your audience about. What led to the need to do a trial, survey, or study. Spell out what the challenges was and why it matters to your audience.
• Define how you acquired the data. What were the circumstances, protocol or other setup? Were there control groups?
• Give your interpretation of the data. Do not be vague about what you think it means.

Persuading Your Audience

This type of presentation is most likely created by a company that sells to healthcare professionals and hospitals. You need to persuade the decision makers in the room that your product can resolve a challenge or make life easier somehow for those using it.

So, how should you structure this type of presentation? Well, your ability to persuade is going to be based on proving the value of your product or service. Consider this sequence:

• Breakdown the challenge: show the audience that you understand all their pain points and the negative things that result from that.
• Set-up the solution: present your solution based off of the benefits (instead of being purely product-driven)
• Show proof: include case studies, testimonials, ratings, and anything else that supports your points
• Close with urgency: this is the ultimate time to persuade, and you should do so with an air of “fear of missing out,” which can push the stakeholders to make a decision

Recommending to Your Audience

Another type of healthcare presentation is one with recommendations that aren’t based off of collected data. This could be an assessment of a processes or a master strategy plan for a department. Recommendations often point out what your audience is doing wrong, but go easy on that so you do't sound insulting.

Try this approach to recommendations:

• What’s working and what isn’t: be transparent on both sides of this and start with it out of the gate
• Point out the bottlenecks: this isn’t a blame game type of section but more of an assessment that certain stages of a process are being held up and why
• Show them how to get from current to future state: map out the way to get from where they are to where they want to be
• Relay what this new experience will be: describe the benefits of making it to the future state and all the positives they can expect like higher productivity or reduced costs

In any presentation you create for healthcare, consider what you are trying to do—inform, persuade, or recommend—and consider using these structure tips we’ve outlined for you. Having the right structure for your healthcare presentation could be exactly what you need to keep your audience’s attention and get them to respond the way you had envisioned.