Different types of editorial and non-editorial services are offered by medical and healthcare communications companies to their clients. Most of these clients are involved with the marketing of their products such as medicines, medical devices, health supplements, growth formulas etc.
All materials are developed as per the client requirements, and are mainly used as promotional tools for marketing campaigns of new medicines; devices etc, or simply to make the general public aware of a drug already available in the market. As obvious, these materials are prepared for a number of audiences such as the medical or healthcare professionals, patients or the general public.
Although these publication materials either contain informative details about the disease condition helpful to the patients, or update a healthcare providers knowledge about patient care and advances in drug development, yet, the main aim and focus of pharmaceutical publication development is purely to increase the client’s product sale.
In a communications company, medical writers are usually required to write for both print publications as well as non-print publications.
Few examples of print publications are listed below:-
Newsletters: These are often developed by companies to send across to key opinion leaders in different therapeutic areas of their interest and contain various articles about specific diseases. Newsletters are usually produced monthly, quarterly or biannually.
Event Highlights: We discussed writing event highlights in detail in one of our earlier posts, so feel free to refer to that if you wish to know more about this. Event highlights contain complete summary of the lecture(s)/talk(s) delivered during various events sponsored solely by a pharmaceutical company or during large scale international conferences.
Clinical Summaries: These are summaries of one or more published scientific articles/papers.
Detail Aids: Also referred to as sales aids or visual aids, they combine specific product information with some creative elements for easy product recall. They help physicians or public to easily remember the product offered by the company.
Disease Charts: They are used to explain various basic aspects of a disease; and can be in simple form a wall poster (pasted on the wall of a doctor’s clinic or hospital) or a desktop flip chart.
Brochures: They are designed for patients or a specific audience (e.g. pregnant women, parents, elderly etc) and contain limited information.
Booklets: These are also designed for patients or specific audiences but contain detailed information.
Materials in a meeting folder: A meeting folder is usually prepared for all large pharmaceutical events, to be handed over to participants. It contains a compilation of different documents such as a welcome letter, meeting agenda, abstract and print outs of slides to be presented by speakers etc.
In addition to these print publications, medical writers are also involved in preparing content for non-print publications which we will discuss in the next post. Stay tuned!