October 10, 2013By Lance Baily

Why Video Production Saves Your Sim Program Money

I’d like to share a little math with you today on medical simulation lab promotional videos. Below is a video I produced in one week when I worked as a Simulation Technology Specialist at Los Angeles Harbor College, which has since been viewed over 21,000 times:

Let’s consider the costs savings of this promotional video:


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Back in January 2009 I earned around $25/hr for being a part-time Sim Tech. This video took me about one week (40 hours) to shoot, edit and publish for a total hourly cost to the program of: $1000. Let’s add $500 for the HD camera and editing computer I used there as well, for a total cost of $1500.

Let’s consider that this 5 minute video efficiently covers the small three-room sim lab, which in real life may take more like 10-15 minutes. But to compare apples to apples, let’s say it only takes 5 minutes to do this tour in person as well.

If I gave this tour to 21,230 people, at 5 minutes at a time, that is 106,150 minutes, or just over 1,769 hours. That ends up being about 221 8-hour days of tours since 2009. If the sim center paid me for those minutes it would end up costing them $44,225 – so subtract the $1500 production cost and that puts you at a cost savings of $42,725!

Never mind scheduling those groups of people plus that the tour is more efficienty in quickly moving through the tour, and you can see why video production can quickly save your medical simulation program money!


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Here are two more examples of medical simulation lab video tours, from the University of Phoenix and Ohlone College, both of which have been watched over 6,000 times!



Not only does this work for promotional videos, but orientation and training videos as well. Consider that a video orientation to a sim lab room before a physical orientation, will provide learners an additional opportunity to understand the space. This will cut down on time in the scenario spent “finding the O2 mask”, and more time on simulation learning objectives! Of course, it also cuts down on staff time as physical orientations will take less time. Watch this video orientation we produced at the Clinical Simulation Center of Las Vegas:

You can learn how to produce your own healthcare simulation lab orientation/promo videos through my 2-part sim lab video production tutorial:

  1. Sim Lab Video Production Tutorial Part-1
  2. Sim Lab Video Production Tutorial Part-2 (includes article resources)

Lastly, check out my article regarding Adding Media Content to your Simulation Program Website!


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