M Health Offers A New Take On Medical Education
M Health is excited to announce the launch of TRILOGY, a novel storytelling framework that helps medical affairs and marketing professionals take a comprehensive and highly engaging approach to medical education. TRILOGY weaves together content from three critical perspectives: clinical science, human impact, and value delivered. This content is brought to life in a dynamic, multi-media experience that can be delivered in a variety of settings and can be presenter-driven or self-guided. The intention is to provide healthcare professionals and other learners with a truly rich, real-world understanding of a topic.
Why storytelling?
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) are trained to look at things dispassionately. Bias, assumption, and wishful thinking are the enemy. Evidence, data, and direct observation are the lingua franca. HCPs need to make informed judgements. Above all, they prize accurate information. It is the basis of all good science, all good medicine, and, for that matter, all good decision-making.
When it comes to medical education, the conveyance of accurate information is, of course, the starting point. But it’s only the starting point. If the goal of education is to develop a true understanding of a topic, then education developers must do more than impart accurate information. They have to contextualize that information in ways that are relevant to the people who need it. Even more fundamentally, they have to connect with those people in the first place. That requires going beyond dry, didactic presentations. From our perspective, engagement, humanity, and practicality are the elements that turn accurate medical information into compelling healthcare stories. These, in turn, lead to deeper understanding.
The six principles
What separates a good healthcare story from one that’s not so good? What are the necessary ingredients? Learning always takes place within a cultural context. Given the needs and expectations of HCPs today, what are the must-haves for a story to connect? In reflecting on these questions, M Health has landed on the following six principles.
Practice Essentialism. These days, no one has the time or bandwidth for anything extraneous.
Humanize It. Technical information is great, but how does this impact my patients, my neighbors, my mom?
Visualize It. Words can be vague; numbers can get garbled. Images stick.
Be Interactive. Today’s information consumers are used to being in control. Let them be.
Credibility First. Strong evidence is the best defense against rising skepticism.
Context: Real-World. But is it practical? Is it feasible? Can people benefit from it here and now?
These are the underlying principles that guided the development of TRILOGY.
TRILOGY: So, what exactly is it?
Essentially, TRILOGY is nothing more than a framework for telling complex healthcare stories in the digital age. It’s suitable for relating a wide range of stories, from basic disease education to the possibilities of a new therapeutic. What all TRILOGY stories have in common is a tripartite structure.
A TRILOGY story always brings to life the most essential clinical or scientific story elements. Typically, this may involve a pathophysiology and/or a mechanism-of-action video and related content.
A TRILOGY story will also include content from the human perspective. How does the subject-matter impact the everyday lives of patients, caregivers, HCPs, or all of the above? Human impact will often be expressed in both quantitative and qualitative terms. For example, the incidence and prevalence data of rare disease states might be accompanied by videoclips of the affected patients and caregivers as they relate their own personal experience, often in very moving and dramatic ways.
Finally, a TRILOGY story will always present topics in a value-informed context. Disease burden, health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), and related data can provide important insight into the magnitude of a given health problem or the value of a potential solution.
TRILOGY allows users and presenters to navigate content according to their own interests and at their own pace. The mix of video, text, data, animations, and infographics makes for a particularly engaging experience. The multi-modal nature of TRILOGY is itself an accelerator of learning.
Case study: gene therapy comes to SMA
M Health piloted TRILOGY in the setting of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA is an especially cruel condition. It is a rare neuro-degenerative disease that manifests in infancy and leads to the progressive loss of spinal motor neurons. Children born with SMA Type 1 typically fail to meet basic developmental milestones and rarely live past their second birthday.
However, in recent years, a gene therapy was launched that dramatically transformed the outlook for those affected by SMA. Via a viral vector, onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi (OAX) inserts a working copy of the missing or defective gene implicated in SMA. It can thereby halt disease progression altogether and result in a radically improved future for affected children.
Currently, OAX is available at relatively few centers of excellence. There is a need for gene therapy educational assets suitable for the entire multi-disciplinary team (MDT) needed to support OAX treatment, including specialist nurses, pharmacists, and physical therapists. A TRILOGY pilot was developed to meet the basic education needs of MDTs likely to work with OAX in the future.
TRILOGY allows learners to explore the stories of two actual SMA families, representing two key patient-types. The journey from presentation to prognosis comes to life through multimedia content that is as captivating as it is informative. By combining clinical, human, and value perspectives, this activity provides a rich and practical overview of the emerging role of gene therapy in the treatment of SMA. It is a fascinating and remarkably hopeful healthcare story.
Explore TRILOGY for yourself
The possibilities of TRILOGY are best appreciated through firsthand experience. You can explore the SMA pilot for yourself at m-health.com/trilogy. As you do, consider how interactive healthcare storytelling can help you connect with your stakeholders and achieve your educational goals. To start a discussion, reach out to the managing partners at smartino@m-health.com or jsurie@m-health.com.
