Accurate communication : explaining a medical technology to a mass audience

honors thesisCollege of HumanitiesCommunicationJakob D. JensenThe purpose of this thesis project is to describe the process I have taken, and that others could follow, to use the written communication tecliniques that I have learned during my undergraduate career to accurately inform a non-medically trained mass audience of a medical technology. Clear communication concerning a medical technology is not only useful in our day and age, but it is necessary. Medical technology must be explained to non-medically trained individuals for a variety of reasons: for a patient and their family that may benefit from the use of the technology, potential investor interests, professors that must teach their students about the new technology, or media personnel that can assist in disbursing the knowledge of this new technology. I have been working with Thad Kelling, of the University of Utah Technology Venture Department. We formed a list of medical inventors associated with the University of Utah that I desired to interview. I provide trail scriptions of interviews that I conducted with two inventors of medical technologies; I then proceed to give examples of how I turned those interviews into press releases, profile pieces and a classroom lecture, used to communicate the technologies to a mass audience. My goal as a communication major is to detail my process of accurately describing a medical technology, while still using proper medical and engineering verbiage, to a mass audience in a way that is easily understood