HLTH 5673 Module 4 Message Development and Testing Paper Example

Three Messages, Four Tests: Writing Lung Screening Invitations That a Sixth Grader Can Read, a Spanish Speaker Can Trust and a Lawyer Can Defend

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5673: Marketing for Healthcare Professionals

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

July 24, 2028

The Standards Before the Drafts

The previous modules chose two primary target segments, former smokers connected to primary care and adults newly eligible under the 2021 criteria, and one secondary segment, current smokers who avoid the subject, and positioned the composite hospital's lung screening program on nearness and on a navigator who stays with every abnormal result. This module writes the messages. Every message must meet three standards before any money is spent on distribution.

The first standard is health literacy. An updated systematic review by Berkman et al. (2011) tied limited health literacy to more hospital stays and emergency visits, to missed preventive care such as mammograms and flu shots and, in older adults, to worse overall health and earlier death. Many eligible residents are over 65, the group in which limited health literacy is most common, so every message will aim for sixth-grade reading or easier. The second standard is language: about 9 percent of eligible residents prefer Spanish, and they need messages written for them, not translated after the fact. The third is honesty. Screening has real benefits and real harms, and a message that mentions only the benefits is both misleading and, eventually, bad for trust. A message that most eligible residents cannot read is not a message to them.

The Three Drafts

Message A, for former smokers connected to primary care, is a letter sent from the patient's own physician's practice: "You may qualify for a lung scan. If you are 50 to 80 and smoked for many years, even if you quit, a quick scan can find lung cancer early, when it is easier to treat. Medicare and most insurance pay for it. Call us and we will check if you qualify. You can get checked and scanned in one visit, about 15 minutes from home." The practice's name appears first because patients trust their own physician more than a hospital.

Message B, for newly eligible adults, leads with the change: "The rules changed. More people now qualify for a lung scan, including people in their early 50s and people who smoked less than before. Your doctor may not have told you yet." Message C, for current smokers, avoids blame: "Worried about your lungs? You are not alone, and it is not too late to check. A lung scan takes minutes. If it finds something, a nurse will help you with every next step. We can also help you quit when you are ready, but you do not have to quit to get checked."

The design choices matter as much as the words. Printed versions use 14-point type, short lines and a single photograph of a smiling older adult on a porch, not an image of lungs or a hospital scanner, since medical images tend to raise the fear that keeps people away. There are no statistics in any message, because numbers in marketing copy are easily misread and the full numbers belong in the decision visit. Each message has one action, a phone call, with the number printed in large type and repeated at the bottom, and a line saying that the call is answered by a nurse on weekdays until 7 p.m. The digital versions for the patient portal follow the same structure, with a button that opens the eligibility check rather than a general program web page.

What the Tests Found

Each draft was tested four ways. Readability formulas placed messages A and B at about the fifth-grade level, but message C scored at the eighth grade because of the words navigator and appointment in its first version; both were replaced. Each draft was then rated on the federal patient-materials instrument known as PEMAT, which asks whether materials are understandable and whether they tell readers what to do (Shoemaker et al., 2014). All three were understandable, but message B scored poorly on actionability because it explained the change without saying what to do next; a call to action and phone number were added. The drafts were also scored with the CDC Clear Communication Index, which checks features such as a single main message, plain language and a clear behavioral recommendation (Baur & Prue, 2014); message A initially buried its main message under an explanation of eligibility and was reordered.

Finally, the program held cognitive interviews with 12 eligible residents, eight in English and four in Spanish, asking each to explain the message in their own words. Three English-speaking former smokers read quick scan as a chest X-ray, so the wording became a low-dose CT scan, a quick picture of your lungs. The Spanish version, written by a bilingual health educator from the community rather than translated, tested well, but two participants asked whether the scan required legal status to be covered, so the Spanish materials now state plainly that the program does not ask about immigration status.

Honest Claims: Benefits and Harms in Numbers

The most important test was the claims review by the hospital's compliance office and the program's medical director. The phrase easier to treat is supported: screening finds more cancers at early stages. But the program must be careful with numbers. In the large national trial, deaths from lung cancer were one-fifth lower among people scanned with low-dose CT than among those given chest X-rays, and about 24 percent of participants had at least one positive screen over three rounds, the great majority of which were false positives (National Lung Screening Trial Research Team, 2011). In absolute terms, the trial's mortality results correspond to about three fewer lung cancer deaths for every 1,000 people screened over the study period.

The review concluded that marketing messages will not quote the 20 percent figure alone, because relative reductions sound larger than they are. The shared decision-making visit, not the marketing message, is where benefits and harms are explained in full, using a decision aid with absolute numbers. Marketing messages may say that screening can find cancer early and that most abnormal results turn out not to be cancer, which is both true and reassuring. No message may say that screening prevents cancer or that a normal scan means a person is cancer-free. The honest number is smaller than the impressive one, and it is the only one the program can afford to use.

Final Messages and Next Steps

The revised messages are at or below a sixth-grade level, meet the standards of both assessment tools, were understood correctly by all interview participants in their second versions and contain only claims the compliance office approved. Each exists in English and Spanish, with the Spanish versions reviewed by two community members. The next module decides how these messages reach each segment, through physician practices, the hospital's patient portal, community partners and paid media, and which of those channels privacy rules and referral laws allow.

References

Baur, C., & Prue, C. (2014). The CDC Clear Communication Index is a new evidence-based tool to prepare and review health information. Health Promotion Practice, 15(5), 629-637. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839914538969

Berkman, N. D., Sheridan, S. L., Donahue, K. E., Halpern, D. J., & Crotty, K. (2011). Low health literacy and health outcomes: An updated systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine, 155(2), 97-107. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-155-2-201107190-00005

National Lung Screening Trial Research Team. (2011). Reduced lung-cancer mortality with low-dose computed tomographic screening. New England Journal of Medicine, 365(5), 395-409. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1102873

Shoemaker, S. J., Wolf, M. S., & Brach, C. (2014). Development of the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT): A new measure of understandability and actionability for print and audiovisual patient information. Patient Education and Counseling, 96(3), 395-403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2014.05.027