How are top medical animations saving lives?
A well made medical animation saves lives. Whether it’s to inform patients of a procedure, or convince investors to get to market faster - lives are on the table.
When the stakes are quite literally life or death and profits run into the hundreds of millions or billions, getting it “right” becomes more important than within other industries.
Ask any healthcare video experts what the caveat is and 9/10 will say “regulatations”. You have to be careful with what, how and why you say almost anything.
Better safe than sorry has never rung more true than in healthcare.
Max Planck famously said “science advances one funeral at a time”.
Which has cynical undertones but isn’t without merit.
Science and in particular healthcare is a slow, methodical process. Being wrong is a huge liability, so a certain amount of conservatism is naturally built into healthcare.
It’s also the reason medical animation is growing from 360 million in 2022, up to 1.4billion in 2032.
In a lot of industries - animation is part of your marketing mix.
Here’s why medical animation services are at growing at 20% year over year
When you want to create a video for healthcare there’s a serious reason behind it.
It’s rarely “just for fun”. As such healthcare videos are actually driving incredible results such as:
- Reducing medical errors (mistakes, miscommunication) which kill around 250,000 people per year. Unlike how to use your vacuum, medical instructions aren’t something you can afford to get wrong.
- Doctors are stretched thin and per patient have less time than ever before. Videos help offload redundant or repetitive work.
- As new medical device and software development speeds up - there’s more need for education than ever before. Or risk long sales cycles followed up by market rejection.
- Videos explaining mechanism of action for new drugs to speed up time to market.
When the price of error is potentially death or lawsuits into the hundreds of millions there’s a lot riding on each animation.
Digging into one of the most horrifying statistics within the medical niche is the forgetfulness of patients.
40-80% of information is forgotten by healthcare patients
Shocking but most people don’t remember what their doctor or nurses said. If you’re curious, it’s due to the psychological effects of stress and “state dependency” which means our recall is better in situations where we’re under the same emotion as when taking information in.
And so introducing instructional medical animations.
This is one of the easiest and most obvious applications. In medicine there’s a lot of need for explanation of the same concept, instruction or treatment over and over.
And when people don’t remember it’s convenient to have a medical procedure video which can explain to them: what to do, expect and processes to follow.
This is great for patients because they can review on their own time, but it also helps to solve one of the biggest issues in medicine: the doctor shortage.
Which is the elephant in the room. Because today being a doctor is becoming a less and less desirable profession (statistically speaking).
And in many countries the number of doctors isn’t keeping up with population growth.
There’s a doctor shortage and it’s getting worse
Even if patients didn’t forget medical instructions, there’s still the issue of doctors repeating themselves.
doctors have less and less time because there’s fewer of them relative to patients.
The anecdote about doctors not listening and rushing to prescribe something, anything, just to get you out of the office, is well, not a joke.
Many healthcare systems around the world are over burdened. Doctor populations can’t keep up with the growth of patient populations.
Simply not enough doctors to go around.
Animation is not a long term solution but it can definitely help to free up doctor time by standardizing explanations of mechanisms of drugs, common procedures or follow up instructions.
And in this way allowing doctors to focus on higher priority work such as developing stronger in person relationships.
Which are also linked to better recovery rates. So it’s a no brainer for organizations to do a cost calculation on the amount of time saved vs capital expenditure on the videos.
Medical animation to speed up intra-organizational sales cycles
Like all organizations making sales you need to educate prospects about whats possible and available. In healthcare the resistance to accepting new technologies is higher than other industries.
This puts more pressure on developing educational materials. And it creates monetary reward for having healthcare technology adopted faster.
And since a lot of healthcare startups are not immediately profitable it’s a big deal.
The quicker your product enters the market, the sooner it can grab market share and become profitable. How profitable? Here’s a quick cost calculation:
Some of our healthcare clients sell software in the hundreds of thousands per year. When you compare this to the cost of a few videos (10-50k) it’s almost a no brainer.
The upside for increasing sales cycle speed is huge. That’s what happens when your AOV and LTV are in the hundreds of thousands or millions (sometimes more).
Combined with the fact that a lot of software and hardware is inherently hard to understand because it’s new. And the more innovative it is, the more education it requires.
VR surgery reduces errors by 6 times
Two types of development in medical video are AR and VR. Both are showing enormous potential progress.
VR simulations have proven that their efficacy is outstanding. It’s looking to be a tool which can truly redefine how surgeons and other specialists are being trained.
It’s proven to improve the operating room results by letting surgeons practise in a more neutral environment first.
Similar to how it’s used for pilots or high stakes engineering jobs. It can remove the need to have to learn only “on the job” and take a bit of the pressure off.
These factor into an explosion of 3D and 2D medical animations
Over the last decade the industry of illustrators and animators specifically for medical topics has grown fast. With an annual CAGR average of almost 20%.
And it is not just going towards video ads healthcare style. Actually a lot of it goes towards education, training and internal communications within healthcare organizations.
Unlike other industries where it’s a “nice to have” in medicine it’s becoming more and more of a “must have”. But to make it you need scientific accuracy - and this is hard to find.
- Most visual creative artists don’t have a high scientific understanding of medicine
- The mix of visual skills and a conceptual understanding is rare and unlikely
- Few organizations release healthcare video case studies of effectiveness for communication of complex or simple medical information
It’s hard to find great medical illustrators or animators (they exist but are so rare)
“Greys Anatomy” which is considered one of the most credible books on medical illustration is released in 1858. To this day it’s still one of the most used references.
And yes there are certain ethical considerations to cutting people open, but it’s also some of the best of the best. You take a look for yourself and tell me: who can draw like that today?
Because there aren't many people who can combine the necessary skills to do medical illustration or animation. And this is true to this day.
This makes it hard even if you have the project to actually find someone to realize it. Usually you need a mix of creative and analytical skills plus subject-matter knowledge.
Otherwise even the best creative is going to make a lot of mistakes.
And even a lot of healthcare stock footage is not useful for this reason. It lacks specificity and looks generic. Making it good for in between shots but hardly applicable for most of what's necessary.
That’s the state of medical animation in 2025
There’s a lot to say on medical video animation from a concept or how to write them point of view, what kind of messaging works, and the difference between B2C/B2B medical brands.
So consider this an overview piece of where medical animation is headed in 2025.
And the general consensus is that it’s growing faster than ever before, with more opportunities on the horizon.
In the next few years we’ll continue to see a compounding effect, as more medical content becomes available, and more organizations open up towards using it.
And if you’re looking to create a medical video animation consider our healthcare explainer video agency. With over 13 years of experience, we can help with all aspects of the process. Letting you focus on the important stuff beyond video production.
From 2D or 3D medical animations, we can help with it all. Just use the contact form to get in touch.
