Medical Writing Essentials: Breaking down complex medical concepts
Medical writing involves writing and communicating scientific documents of different types which include regulatory and research-related documents, disease or drug-related educational and promotional literature, publication articles like journal manuscripts and abstracts, content for healthcare websites, health-related magazines or news articles in a clear, brief, plausible, absolute, and convincing manner. The nature of medical writing varies based on the need of the level of understanding of the target audience, for example documents for medical journals, doctors or physicians, patients, pharmaceutical companies etc. Several tools and techniques have been devised and are still being developed to implement effective medical documents.
A competent Medical Writer must have good understanding of life science, medical and pharmaceutical terms along with understanding of the medical concepts and terminology, knowledge of relevant guidelines as regards the structure and contents of specific documents, and good writing skills. Qualities of an efficient Medical Writer comprise of correct interpretation of target audience needs, better perception of project objectives, ability to organize thoughts, deliver within stringent timelines and format of content. They also need to be familiar with searching medical or scientific literature survey tools, understanding and presenting research data, the document review process, and editing and publishing requirements. Upgrading their knowledge and skills on an ongoing basis is of utmost importance for medical writers and other stakeholders. As science depends on clear and accurate reporting so the importance of good medical writing cannot be ignored – an otherwise meticulous research can appear faulty if it is poorly presented.
Medical writing should begin with appropriate scientific literature databases search like PubMed, google scholar, clinical trial.gov, and NIH.gov, will fetch the required information. In order to construct and frame an original scientific article is justified on the basis of thorough literature review and genuine references which make literature search even much more important.
In medical writing there must be cohesion between sentences those must grow together and these glued paragraphs are capable of conveying the medical writer ideas effectively, whereas a non-cohesive mass of sentences leaves the reader confused and frustrated. The principle of cohesion in medical writing is that the sentences must provide linear flow of information making document appealing and interesting to reader.
The writers must be trained immensely to create high impact documents in the best possible way with the help of dedicated software’s that supplements the medical writing project. Some paid and freely available software tools that can come in handy are MS word, MS excel, adobe photoshop, Scrivener (used for aligning research), ReadCube, and EndNote, etc. The software that assist in discovering grammatical errors or spellchecks in the documents are Inductel, Spellex, and Stedman’s.
Medical Writer must be capable of assembling the draft in a proper format, with clear and precise explanation presented without ambiguity. As a draft is ready it is revised repeatedly to make it more precise, clear, communicative, revealing and comprehensive. Medical writer should have the ability to draft various types of articles for example research article, original article, systematic review, brief report, editorial, case reports, and letter to editor. In addition to manuscript preparation, an effective Medical Writer should possess the skills to ascertain the quality (high impact factor and different indexes or rankings) and selection of journals. Furthermore, medical writing includes promotional write ups, conferences write ups, patient information materials, promotional items for marketing and sales team and training material.
Other attributes of a competent Medical Writer include presentation of the data in accordance to requirement or predefined SOPs and most crucial of all is to avert plagiarism.
Medical writing has not remained a child’s play and representation of clinical projects can be quite challenging in terms of efficiency and cost. One cannot ignore the required quality of these documents since hampering these documents can further lead to failure in launching device/s in the market.
WorkSure® supports in providing Medical Writing services for pharmaceutical companies, biotech organizations, hospitals, clinical research organizations, medical diagnostic companies and other health communication agencies.
