How OPOs Can Improve Educational Outreach: A New Perspective on an Old Problem

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Last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about a problem we hear about often in our Hospital Partners Study that we conduct for Organ Procurement Organizations:

Why is there so much demand for in-hospital education about the donation process, but so little utilization of it?

It’s not that OPO professionals aren’t trying. One thing we’ve heard across the country is that those in Hospital Development and Hospital Services roles are working really hard to not only provide formal educational sessions, but also to provide in-the-moment training, on-demand resources and experiences such as workshops and simulations.

And yet, for all this effort, many folks in these roles have told us that they feel their efforts are often stymied by limited availability, complex hospital restrictions and general lack of time and interest. We’ve heard many frustrated stories and we know that this is a major source of angst and anxiety for many in the OPO world.

After reading thousands of interviews with physicians and nurses across the country, we at RPG came to the conclusion that there are really four issues that are at the room of the problem:

  • Scheduling
  • Location
  • Visibility
  • Interest

That last point – interest – is particularly important, because our data suggest that interest in learning about donation is quite a bit higher than the behavior of attending educational courses would suggest. We’ve also found that many of the fundamental aspects of the donation process – what it is, how it works, the roles partners will play, and so forth – are among the most highly-desired components of any educational programming.

One of the biggest challenges of in-hospital education is that the OPO wants to provide the audience with a lot of information about a topic that is:

  • Abstracted into a process with lots of protocols and numbers to understand
  • Complex and full of jargon
  • Loaded with presumptions that don’t always represent a common understanding of death and donation
  • An irregularity in the daily life of those who may participate in cases

It’s not easy to teach anything under these circumstances!

One of the issues we have observed with education that’s being provided to hospital partners is that it’s often not well-matched to the needs that are being expressed. It represents what the OPOs think hospital partners want, not what they actually express that they want.

Broadly speaking, hospital partners want education that is:

  • Onsite
  • Focused on the fundamentals
  • Supported with physical and digital reference materials
  • Centered on helping them to understand the role they will play in the process.

But there’s more to what they want than that! Beneath the surface, there is also a need for:

  • Understanding that a partner’s colleagues are being educated (including nursing staff, residents and fellows)
  • Providing clear explanations of the basics of the donation process (e.g. brain death criteria, DCD vs. brain death, steps of the process, donor management, donor family management, etc.)
  • Helping partners to set appropriate expectations for what an encounter with the OPO should look like

The data suggest that education is desired, but not utilized.

And it’s important to recognize that the reason for this is because the audience is made up of people who crave information but who don’t have a lot of time to consume it.

Education is often being presented as a sit-down dinner, when it really often needs to be presented as a quick-service meal available when and where it’s convenient.

Physicians, in particular, are difficult to educate because they are academics, and that means you have to understand how academics think and behave. Academics:

  • Are skeptical by nature
  • Evaluate claims by reviewing evidence
  • Have sharp minds and quickly jump to conclusions
  • Need to be engaged to commit their attention

What we need to recognize is that education is not just an info dump. It’s a service that packages information into chunks which can be easily digested.

In other words, providing effective education is about preparing a splendid meal designed to suit the tastes of your audience – not handing them a bag of groceries and expecting them to prepare it themselves.

Think of education as an opportunity for dialogue with the audience where you’re speaking first to get their questions answered before they can ask them. Engage them. Provide varied packaging for what you’re hoping to teach.

One question that needs to be asked before any educational opportunity is “what are we doing to make the audience excited to hear us speak?” (The answer should be based on more than your own internal perspective – seek external feedback!)

If that question doesn’t elicit an enthusiastic answer, it’s worth putting some time into making the educational session special. Experience management (XM) tools provide many wonderful ways that you can measure the effectiveness of these elements.

In the presentation, I offered three techniques that can be used to make presentations more engaging and memorable by providing examples to teach my audience about three tough topics in a short period of time:

The solution to the problem of education is not easy nor is apparent. But we’d suggest it will involve some combination of the following four actions:

  • Cater to your audience by packaging information into appetizing, digestible pieces.
  • Engage your audience by using techniques that connect your world to theirs.
  • Regard your audience by understanding how they like to learn and matching your style to their preference.
  • Focus your passion not on the topic itself, but on making your audience care about the topic as much as you do. 

We hope this article has been helpful to you, and we want you to know that we’re here to be a resource however we can be on anything you’d like to know about marketing research!

There are many other videos from our Best Practices Summit for Hospital Development and Hospital Services roles – you can find them here!

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