A note on the detriment of Jargon

I work on decreasing patients' Time to Therapy in the HealthTech space. As such, I have to communicate with many external stakeholders about highly technical decisions. There are ridiculous amounts of jargon that have to be plowed through before any human understands what's being discussed.

From FRMs, PSCs, to FIAs, DTRs, ATRs, to RMTs, NPIs and NCPDPs, it's easy to get lost. This increases ramp-up time and I reckon it's the leading cause of why developers at our company struggle so much in their first 1-3 months. I know this because here I am, two years later, and I still have trouble keeping my eyes open during some of these meetings. It's hard to build context and understanding when vocabulary poses such a large issue.

I had a conversation earlier today that was so inundated with jargon, it struck me that it would be completely unintelligible to an outside audience.

I had a question about my work and I asked for help. Instead of getting an answer to what was a relatively easy question, I had to work back and forth with someone to make sure we had our terms defined and understood what each other was talking about.

It's not just that these conversations are painful and horrible and bad.

It's that they're fat, and we'd do well to trim it.

Most conversations that we have at meetings have questions on such a fundamental level, e.g. "What does ABC mean?", and we have a lot of groundwork to cover before we can begin talking about any given topic.

We would do better to eliminate as much jargon as possible to enhance our ability to communicate and understand these topics.

Consider this a plea; Stop jargon.

Simplify your speech.

Watch others' eyes stop glossing over in the middle of your meetings.

What do you think? Is this a problem in other fields, or a unique one to Health?

Thanks for reading

Austin