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- [Not] Just for Newbies
- On the Radar
- Dollars & Sense
- TAMW Calendar
- The Savvy Marketer
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Mad About March
In the United States, March is the month of madness--at least if you're a college basketball fan! We're not what you'd call basketball devotees, not by any stretch of the imagination. But that doesn't mean we don't find certain situations maddening now and then. And that's what this March issue of Pencil Points is all about.
Generally we like to play by the rules, especially when it comes to the law. In [Not] Just for Newbies we reveal a situation where we just might be disobeying copyright law, and that makes us very uncomfortable, especially because we don't have a solution.
Are you a physician who's been thinking about dipping a toe into the social-media pool? If so, then the social-media site we highlight in this month's On the Radar may be just what you've been waiting for.
Who doesn't want to work harder for less money? In Dollars and Sense we openly discuss the CME elephants in the room: writing needs assessments for peanuts and minimizing the use of medical writers when creating CME content. In our opinion, both issues will have potentially deleterious effects on CME quality and accuracy.
And finally, in The Savvy Marketer we talk about a subject that's maddening to many: US healthcare reform and how it will affect the way you market your freelance business.
We all encounter situations that drive us crazy. That's life. Don't let them keep you from moving forward. We don't.
Wishing you writing success,
Cyndy and Brian
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 [NOT] JUST FOR NEWBIES
Information and Inspiration for New and Experienced Writers | | |
Writing for Medical-Legal Review: How Do You Handle Copyright Issues?
Writing materials that go through medical-legal review (MLR) is a complex--and occasionally daunting--process, especially if you've never written these kind of
materials before. You start by identifying sources that will be acceptable for the review, such as peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters in textbooks, and documents produced by reputable government and professional organizations (think National Institutes of Health or the American Academy of Pediatrics, to name a few). And you need to make sure they were published within an acceptable time frame. One of our clients will only accept publications produced within the past 5 years, so we are very careful when doing our initial literature search. For this client, the greatest source won't work if it's more than 5 years old. Once you have your reference sources, you must carefully annotate the document you write, which is a matter of identifying in brackets the source, usually by inserting the first author and date and the page number and section on the page where you found the information. Here's an example: "The final primary endpoint results of the GAF-2 trial showed PFS of 9.7 months in all treated patients. [Alpha 2012/2A]" This tells reviewers that they'll find the source of this statement on page 2, section A of the Alpha 2012 reference. But you're still not done. Now you must go into the actual reference and electronically highlight or insert a box, perhaps with a designating letter, around the specific text using Adobe Acrobat Standard . Adobe Reader won't do. Electronic is the key word here. All of our clients require electronic copies of the sources we use to produce our deliverables. That's usually not a problem because these days we can easily find and download copies of journal articles, clinical practice guidelines, position statements, and other such documents. We can even get copies of certain textbooks through online databases like MD Consult. The problem comes when we've used a textbook or another source that we don't have in electronic format. The issue raised its ugly head several months ago when we went to the copy center asking for a PDF to be made of a chapter in a college textbook. We had used the chapter for a basic biology primer, the kind of information you don't usually find in publications geared toward the medical professional who already knows this stuff. The copy center employee refused to copy the pages, citing copyright issues, and she was well in her rights, we might add. This got us thinking, are we violating copyright laws when we create these documents for MLR? You see, even electronic documents include disclaimers stating that "no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without permission in writing from the author." Yikes! Aren't we doing just that? We're not lawyers, and we don't play lawyers on TV, but the copy center's refusal to create the PDF made us quite uncomfortable. And it made us realize that, until we can get some additional clarification on this issue, in the future we probably won't use anything we can't obtain electronically. US copyright law does include something called "fair use" that limits authors' and publishers' exclusive rights. Section 107 of the US Code states that, "...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." We can argue that the highlighted sources we create are being used for teaching and research, but we're not sure that would fly at the copy center. We plan to discuss this issue with our clients to get their take on it, and we'll report back to you in a future issue of Pencil Points. |
ON THE RADAR
Resources for Medical Writers | |
Social Media Exclusively For MDs
If you're a physician thinking about dabbling in social media, then Sermo may be for you. Sermo is a social-media site reserved exclusively for licensed physicians--MDs or DOs--in the United States. According to the website, more than 125,000 physicians already are members. Some of Sermo's features include:
- An iPhone app that enables physicians on the go to stay connected to the Sermo community
- The iConsult feature, which allows physicians to collaborate with one another by sharing photos, lab and imaging results, and other patient data (all confidentially, of course)
- Resources that deliver the latest clinical trial data, drug and product updates, and prescribing and safety information straight to a computer or smartphone
According to Sermo's website, doctor members spend 40,000 hours on Sermo each
month.
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DOLLARS & SENSE
Advice on the Business of Freelancing
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WANTED: Mediocrity?
Continuing medical education (CME) has undergone quite a transformation over the past few years. Sponsor involvement ends with cutting the check. Not surprisingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, CME program budgets have drastically declined. And medical education companies (MECs) are scrambling to find their place (and profit) in the new world.
Some MECs are diversifying, while others are thinking about getting out of CME altogether. Those that are surviving financially seem to be doing so by relying more on faculty to develop their own content and less on professional medical writers for much-needed support. We still get a lot of calls to write needs assessments. But what's the fun if you don't get to sink your teeth into developing the content once the proposal is funded? And what's the sense when there's really not a lot of money to be made in needs assessments?
Are you aghast? We didn't say there isn't money to be made in writing needs assessments, just not a lot of money. We see clients wanting to pay half the price for writing needs assessments today that might be half the length of the ones we were writing a year ago. In some instances, they want to pay even less. Considering all the research and work that goes into writing a good needs assessment, those that were underpriced a year ago at $2000 are now half the length and going for $1000, and as little as $500. Heck, you can eat up half of a $500 budget with teleconferences and emails alone!
Researching and reviewing the medical literature in a given therapeutic area takes the same amount of time whether the needs assessment you're writing is 4 pages or 8 pages in length. And yes, it really does take more time to write less than it does to write more--you have to be that much more careful about making every word work hard.
But here's the kicker. As faculty are required to produce more of their own content so MECs can still make money, the time it takes for a CME program to move from funding to finished is becoming longer. We believe quality and accuracy are soon to suffer as well as the timeline, if they aren't already.
Any professional medical writer or editor who has worked with healthcare professional faculty and authors knows that writing a PowerPoint presentation or a manuscript is not their first priority, and often not even their second or third priority. Most likely it's not in their primary skill set, either. Just as we'd be dangerous with a scalpel in our hands, many healthcare professionals are dangerous with a keyboard in theirs. The difference is, we know we can't perform brain surgery whereas most people who can't write don't know they can't write.
We suspect few healthcare professionals who are not professional medical communicators are willing to annotate documents and highlight references the way we're expected to do (see this month's article in [Not] Just for Newbies). Speaking of referencing, we've also encountered physician authors and faculty who are not as accurate in quoting the medical literature as a medical writer. That may be simply because we don't write from memory. It can also be difficult to get physician authors and faculty to appreciate that it's not enough to know they are right, they must still back up their statements with supporting evidence. Don't even get us started on writing proper reference citations!
Want to read something really chilling? A past client of ours with whom we have not had the pleasure of working very much lately because of their impossibly low budgets, recently tried to sell us on their new, streamlined approach to needs assessments. It was explained to us that although we would make half of what we used to make writing each needs assessment, we get to write twice as many. Well sign us up! Who doesn't want to work harder for the same, or less, money?
For us, the bottom line is that, from a content development standpoint, the CME industry seems to be slipping. This troubles us not because it affects our freelance businesses, which it doesn't because we're diversified and can refuse to work for clients and market segments that don't want to pay us what we're worth, but because of the message that this new way of doing things is acceptable. It may be keeping a few companies alive, at least for a while, but we don't see the healthcare professionals who need CME credits from benefiting in the long run.
We know a number of great freelance medical writers who have given up on CME, and we suspect more will follow as the changes we've discussed in this article make it harder for us to deliver good work for realistic compensation.
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| WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE BRIAN AND CYNDY?
The Accidental Medical Writer Calendar
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It's not too late to register for the AMWA-DVC 2013 Freelance Workshop, being held Saturday, March 16 at the Hilton Philadelphia Airport, and we're excited to be presenting! Cyndy is hosting a roundtable on Novel Ways to Market Your Business, and Brian is one of the panelists in an open session on The 60-Minute MFBA* (*Master of Freelance Business Administration). We'll also be at the Author Table. We hope you'll join us for this outstanding educational and networking opportunity. Click here to register and click here to view the registration brochure.
If you're looking for additional opportunities to network with colleagues and enhance your career, registration just opened for the 17th Annual AMWA-DVC Princeton Conference being held on Saturday, April 20. We won't be there to present, but we love this conference and want to make sure you know about it, too. There are a total of 4 excellent credit workshops being offered plus 2 very practical and hands-on How-to Sessions. Click here to register and click here to view the registration brochure.
The AMWA Annual Conference is the ultimate resource for medical communicators around the world, offering educational and networking opportunities beyond compare in the field. We submitted several proposals and are now waiting to hear what's been accepted. As soon as we know, we'll let you know.
If you'd like us to come and speak at an event you're organizing, don't wait too long to contact us. Our schedule is filling fast!
Be sure to check out Brian's interview in Breaking Into Medical Writing and Editing by Kristen Fischer that was published online on January 6 by mediabistro.com, a top site for communication professionals who create or work with content. If you're a member of AvantGuild you can access the article for free. If not, there's a $55 annual subscription fee, which gives you access to all the exclusive content the site offers. If you recall, Kristen interviewed Cyndy last year for the Freelance Switch blog, which you can read here. Thanks, Kristen.
For all our upcoming activities and appearances, keep an eye on The Accidental Medical Writer In Person.
We frequently speak and teach at medical writing conferences and seminars; we've also been interviewed online. Check out our Webcasts. Brian's interview with Danielle Hampson of The Business Authors Show is also available right on our website!
We would love to present at your next upcoming meeting or event, so invite us!
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| THE SAVVY MARKETER
Marketing Tips to Build Your Business
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How the Affordable Care Act Will Change Pharmaceutical Marketing
Think the Affordable Care Act (ACA) isn't going to have an effect on how you market yourself? Think again. We believe the ACA will have a huge impact on the way pharmaceutical companies market their products and, consequently, how you market yourself. The impact will be wide ranging, and we just don't have the space in the newsletter to discuss all of them. We want to focus today on just one: positioning and messaging.
If you've written on the promotional side, then you know that a solid positioning and messaging platform is a key component of every successful strategy. Before the ACA, pharmaceutical companies built their positioning primarily on efficacy and safety to differentiate their products because that's what healthcare professionals wanted to know before they would prescribe. Medical communicators working on the promotional side of things are well versed in writing efficacy-safety stories. Now, however, pharmaceutical companies need to move beyond telling a story about how well a product works and doesn't harm patients. They are going to have to build a platform around the value their product brings to the marketplace. That is, how the product improves patient outcomes but at a lower cost than its competitors. And medical communicators will need to learn how to craft those stories.
This means we'll have to familiarize ourselves with and be able to write about comparative-effectiveness research, funds for which are included in the ACA, up to $500 million by 2014. Moreover, we'll need to get up to speed on health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), which we think will become a large part of companies' positioning and messaging strategies going forward. We'll also need to start making connections between patient outcomes and the reimbursement and performance measures that are part of the ACA. Creating data tables that show what percentage of patients experienced adverse events is not going to be enough. We'll need to connect the dots and explain how this impacts clinical and economic outcomes.
The ACA's mission is to deliver more effective care at a lower cost. We don't have a crystal ball, but in our opinion medical communicators who understand the ACA and know how to create these value stories will be in demand. If you want to learn more about the ACA, here are a few publications you'll find helpful:
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