Baylor College of Medicine

We build brand and communication design for hospitals, academic medical centers, and health organizations whose information is complex and whose audience is often facing something frightening. Deciding Together had to speak to patients with end-stage heart failure and the family members beside them as they weigh surgery against continuing medication, and to the doctors and care teams who use it to start those conversations.

Baylor College of Medicine needed to help people with end-stage heart failure and their families make one of the hardest decisions they will face, whether to have surgery for a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) or to keep managing heart failure with medication. Both options carry risks, benefits, and challenges, and the right choice is different for every patient and the people close to them.

Information like that is dense, and the person reading it is often frightened and tired. A conventional booklet would have handed over facts in a format that is easy to put down, and the risk was a patient arriving at a major decision without feeling prepared for it.

Our approach was to build Deciding Together as an interactive kit with separate components rather than a booklet, and to tell a story instead of delivering a lecture. We wrote the copy to make complex information highly readable, and we brought in photographers, writers attuned to health literacy, and illustrators to bring the information and the patient narratives to life, all within a visual identity designed to feel warm and clear from the first page.

Today the kit is something patients and families can pick up at home, talk through together at their own pace, and bring into conversations with their medical team. The Baylor team told us that many patients exclaim they have never seen education materials so beautiful, that the resources help them prepare for and envision life after an upcoming medical decision, and that doctors and medical teams are equally impressed.