Business Writing For Healthcare Professionals

A well-done presentation reflects well on you. Those who do not see you in your clinical work usually have no other way of judging your competence, intelligence and abilities. In business, judging someone’s value by their presentation is common. When you have a presentation, consider a couple, basic, but easily overlooked questions: Who are you presenting to? Different audiences will have different needs, different backgrounds, and different uses for the information you bring. For example, presenting the nursing workflow to senior nursing leadership will be different than presenting the same workflow information to a group of consultants who are engineers. Different audiences may even speak a different professional language. For example, physicians will use a different terminology than the hospital finance department. Whenever possible, learn: Your audience’s needs Your audience’s background(s)   How they may use the information you give them What is your main takeaway ...

 You would not present content the same way to a group of nurses, and to a group of hospital bookkeepers. Both audiences have different needs, stemming from their different roles and responsibilities.   Surprisingly some people basically do just that whether it is in writing, in person, or in a presentation. Knowing your audience is an integral part of making a good impression. If you do not know your audience, you will have a hard time connecting with them, your content will fall on the proverbial deaf ears, and you can look bad. This can hurt your reputation, and potentially the reputation of your entire team or department. Reputation has value, so you want to maximize every opportunity to make a good impression with your audience. Always take your audience into account when you are delivering content, regardless of venue.   To help tailor your delivery, ask yourself the following set of basic questions: What are this audience’s roles and responsibilities? What ar...

  A good presentation affects how people see you. This is especially important outside of the clinical sphere, where others may have a more difficult time seeing your value. One way to demonstrate your value is by giving a presentation that is crisp, clean, well-organized, and audience-appropriate. By contrast, you can reduce the perception of your value with a presentation that is poorly-executed, disorganized, and tailored to the wrong audience. You may have put together presentations through the course of your training as a healthcare professional. However, compared to people in a business environment, slides made by healthcare professionals often look unpolished, look unsophisticated, and are hard to follow. One thing that healthcare professionals fail to address is what type of presentation they are going to make in this regard: Are your slides supposed to be notes for your audience or notes for yourself? When presentations are notes for their audience, you should write yo...

Carefully reading an email before responding to it seems like basic advice everyone should know, but I stopped being surprised at how often this seems to happen.   In a business setting, expect to receive lots of emails. It is easy to breeze through them with a quick skim. To fully comprehend an email, a quick skim is not enough. A quick skim misses key points, especially when other things distract you.   You see this in personal communications as well, many of us can tell when someone clearly didn’t read your email carefully. They answer the email they thought you sent, not the email that you intended to send. This can lead to unfortunate, personal misunderstanding. Such misunderstandings are bad enough in a personal setting, so you do not want those kinds of misunderstandings in a business setting.    I’ve seen this type of avoidable misunderstanding happen in business settings. A quick skim leads to a misreading, which leads to working towards the wrong directi...

Drafts are not just for professional writers, like novelists and journalists. Drafts are useful for short messages, not just lengthy, formal documents. Drafts can help even with mundane, business communications in an email. When you apply writing drafts to your everyday communications, you tend to end up with communications that are more clear . In business, clarity improves the chances that everyone will be on the same page, the team can work in unison, and thus work with more speed and efficiency. By contrast, when the team works in a disjointed manner, you waste time, money, and effort.   Does that mean that you have to have a lengthy process before sending each email? No. You probably do not have time for that. What it does mean is that when you have the opportunity, put the email aside for a few minutes, then go back and re-read it to make sure it says what you want it to sa y. You will find you have added in extraneous things are not helpful or find that you have forgotten t...

Your ideal business email is a short, well-defined essay. Many healthcare professionals think of an essay as a long, drawn-out composition that they had to do in high school, but never had to do again and that holds little value to everyday, clinical practice. As a result, when the modern healthcare system puts them in a position to write a business email, it can easily become too long, rambling, clunky, and unfocused. In contrast, a well-done business email is focused, flows naturally, and short but long enough to get the job done.   A big part of making your emails like well-focused essays is to take an extra few moment and organize your thoughts.    A hypothetical example:    Poorly formed essay:   I discussed the recollection of last week’s incident with the doctor who was present, the nurse’s aide who was present, and the member of the housekeeping team who was present. Each one of them had a different perspective and a different recollection of even...