Privacy in Practice: Securing Healthcare Information

The Client

The Alberta Medical Association (AMA) supports more than 14,000 physicians and patients within the province by advancing patient-centred care and supporting physicians’ wellness. The Accelerating Change Transformation Team (ACTT) is a branch of the AMA that focuses on quality improvement and system transformation for Alberta medical practices.

 

The Opportunity

To improve privacy and security for patients and medical clinics across the province, the AMA partnered with the Government of Alberta to launch a project called Security, Privacy, and Data Sharing. The goal was lofty — to equip every community-based physician and their entire team with the tools and education to stop information breaches in their tracks.

AMA needed communications support to create an awareness campaign about privacy requirements and legislation, develop a learning management system, and create interactive modules to educate their physicians and teams. Once that was done, they’d also need to promote and market the courses to encourage busy physician clinics to sign up.

 

Making it Formidable

Physicians are extremely hard to reach due to how busy they are. To make it even harder, the project launched during a pandemic. The audience generally understood the importance of privacy and security, but the legislation is challenging to understand and not exciting — especially when you have far more important things to do (like save lives!) 

Our communications strategy followed the ADKAR process closely.

Awareness 

Awareness about privacy and its importance in healthcare was needed to get medical professionals interested. 

  • Social media and digital media were used to build awareness. 

  • Improving wayfinding and content on the website made it more digestible.

  • Including CTAs and logical pathways to find more information made it easy for users to learn more once their interest was piqued.

  • We measured engagement rates on social posts, digital newsletters, and website traffic for trends and plateaus.

  • Digital content was constantly adjusted for maximum engagement rates. 

Desire to Participate

We created desire to participate by showing medical professionals their legal and ethical responsibilities.

  • We monitored the uptake of enrolment as well as activity. 

  • We created nudge emails and collateral for HR/leadership teams to encourage their staff to continue learning more. 

  • We optimized the website and simplified the enrolment process to make it easy to sign up.

Knowledge 

Knowledge was highlighted by offering free training to whole clinic teams.

  • Our major objective was to enroll learners in courses. We worked with Power BI dashboards to measure enrolment, completion rates, competencies gained, and zonal uptake. 

  • By offering streaming content delivery, we made it easy and convenient for users to learn at their own pace and time.

  • Including gamification and interactive components allowed us to keep the audience engaged and motivated to continue on. 

  • We used captivating images and created an energized brand with compelling, simplified language to help learners understand complex topics like legislation.

Ability and Reinforcement 

Ability and Reinforcement were addressed through testing and certification. 

  • We worked alongside privacy experts to revamp and develop tools and resources for clinics to implement in their practices. 

  • Feedback loops, including commenting sections and satisfaction surveys, were used throughout the campaign to gather important information and inform changes and improvements. 

 

Services Provided

The Formidable team took on the task of helping the AMA develop their first-ever learning management system. Together with subject matter experts, we took the project from discovery to user experience to branding and marketing to creating 15 courses as part of the Fundamentals and Advanced Privacy Curriculum.

  • Strategic communication planning

  • Social media strategy

  • Content creation

  • Integrated marketing

 
I truly appreciated working with the Formidable team. They were professional, delivered on time, and brought exceptional skill and knowledge to make sure our project was known and understood by a wide audience.
— Micheline Nimmock, Project Lead (former)
 

Formidable Results

Website views were increased by 84% due to improved wayfinding, easily digestible copy, and lots of tangible tools to help clinics implement their own privacy and security programs. A total of 2368 learners were enrolled in the learning management system, Learn@AMA, with a course completion rate of 68%.

% Increase in Website Views

Total Learners Enrolled

% Completion Rate

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