Enabling people with disabilities: Creating accessible electronic documents - Volume 31, Issue

Rather than equating disability with personal identity, we can better understand disability as the consequence of disabling environments. This alternative view suggests that changing the environment can enable people with sensory, motor, and…

Unlocking new efficiencies: How structured content authoring is streamlining the production of clinical documents for the pharmaceutical industry - Volume 32, Issue

Current practice requires clinical and regulatory documents to be created and updated manually by medical writers throughout a product’s development. Conventionally, document content is unstructured, with freeform text, figures, and tables that the…

Writing visually for medical writers - Volume 21, Issue

Although content is obviously important for effective documents, the look of a document is also important. If you want someone to read a document, it should be pleasant to look at, and if you want the document to be used, the information should be…

Landscaping the terminology of accessible language document types - Volume 31, Issue

There are three main types of accessible language documents that medical writers and medical publications professionals may work on. These are regulatory lay summaries, publication-associated plain language summaries (PLS), and standalone plain…

Writing for orphan drugs: A compass to navigate document types and regional requirements - Volume 34, Issue

Medical writing for rare diseases encompasses the development of various regulatory documents that are required to obtain orphan drug designation and marketing authorisation for treatments targeting rare conditions. Effective planning and close…

Medical Writing in Japanese: Writing medical documents in English while thinking in Japanese - Volume 33, Issue

Value of medical writing: The regulator's perspective - Volume 31, Issue

In 2020, the American Medical Writers Association established a working group to assess the value of the contribution of medical writers across the health sciences industry, including a subgroup tasked to gather data on the regulatory agency’s…

Connecting the dots across the writing continuum - Volume 32, Issue

A medical writer has a unique opportunity to be involved with documents across the various stages of a product’s lifecycle. At the start of their careers, writers typically specialise in documents that are created in a particular phase of drug…

Quality control: getting the best out of your review - Volume 21, Issue

In medical writing, quality control (QC) means ensuring that a document's content, style, and format are of high quality. This does not just ‘happen’ but is the result of a systemic QC review. These reviews are critical because mistakes can cause…

Global and multidisciplinary perspectives on collaboration with medical writers - Volume 33, Issue

Medical writers, document quality reviewers, and document specialists work together to produce high-quality clinical and regulatory documents. Cross-functional collaboration with other functional leads like bio statisticians, medical monitors, and…