Medical Illustrators Bring Complex Concepts to Life for Corporate Learners
How medical illustrators support corporate learning for health care leaders
When teaching complex biomedical concepts, a strong course curriculum is important, but the visual aspects of the course are just as important to help learners understand the material more deeply.
Creating interesting and informative learning materials for corporate learners — whether they have a science background or not — is challenging and requires unique expertise. With the help of talented medical illustrators, courses become more easily understood, visually appealing, and more relevant to a wide variety of learners.
At Harvard Medical School (HMS), medical illustrators — many of whom have advanced training and/or certification in the field — are involved early in the production of courses such as HMX Fundamentals and HMX Pro. They work closely with faculty instructors to present course information in the most effective and engaging manner.
A PRO Pharmacology animation that explains the process of drug discovery and development.
HMS medical illustrators working on the development of HMX online medical science courses “spend time thinking about the instructional design, the structure of the information, and how to deliver that to the right audience in a certain amount of time,” says Joanne Muller, MA, CMI, FAMI, senior director of product development in the HMS Office for External Education.
Medical illustrators must make many strategic decisions in course design — including page layout, text, color, line weight, motion, and sound — all of which are important. After all, “when images are well designed, they’re also easier to understand,” says Muller. Muller’s team includes instructional designers, video producers and editors, interactive/UI designers, content specialists, and project managers who collaborate in course creation.
Dorothy Fatunmbi, MS, CMI, is a senior medical and scientific animator/illustrator on that team. In a typical day, Fatunmbi researches complex scientific topics in academic journals and textbooks, produces illustrations and animations, and works closely with faculty instructors to create compelling and instructive images.
When designing for audiences without a scientific background, Fatunmbi, and each medical illustrator on the team, look for ways to provide additional context — for example, showing where in the body an organ is found, what that organ looks like, and then providing detailed anatomy and physiology (see the illustration above created by a medical illustrator in the Product Development group).
“I think to myself, ‘What can I do to guide and orient the viewer through this piece?’” Fatunmbi says. “I try to provide some scaffolding and supporting information for people who are not trained specialists in a given topic.”
A PRO Immunology animation that introduces the mechanism of lymphocyte diversity.
“Time and tone are other important considerations for the corporate audience,” Muller says. The learners are busy professionals, so the courses must be efficient — while still telling an engaging story — and the tone must be enjoyable and entertaining without being silly.
When it comes to more serious topics, medical illustrators adapt their work to be sensitive to the subject matter. For a project on the pharmacological mechanisms behind an opioid overdose, Fatunmbi and her colleagues decided to work in greyscale, rather than color, and use subdued music.
How opioid overdoses happen is “a heavy topic, but it’s relevant for teaching,” Fatunmbi says. “The team and I thought carefully about tone, depiction, and sensitive storytelling.”
Developing an HMX course takes months, and even after the courses are available to the public, the medical illustrators monitor scientific and clinical advances and update illustrations and animations to reflect the most current understanding.
“I think the amount of work and expertise and thought that goes into designing and creating the HMX courses (with the learner experience being top of mind) would be shocking to people,” says Muller. “Nothing's left to chance in any of these videos or animations. It's an extremely thoughtful process.”
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