Dear Colleagues,
On the stage at the 2023 European Meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) I challenged our attendees to identify a better time in history to work in the publication and medical communications profession. Today, through this editorial, I broaden the challenge to our entire field while feeling quite confident that there has never been a more important and enriching period to work in our field. Simply stated, the boundaries of our profession have achieved a new level of impact on the delivery of health care now providing the opportunity and capability to reach beyond our institutions in supporting optimal patient care. When many of us began in the publications profession, our objective was essentially to prepare a high volume of ethical publications, within the shortest development span in the hopes of capturing physician attention with volume. Today, the foundation of our profession remains stable in that our professionals still represent the highest integrity in delivering peer-review publications, however, we now accept the added responsibility of contemplating how published evidence will actually be used in practice. Certainly, epic advances in technology have enabled communication professionals to reach stakeholders directly but I propose there has also been a critical shift in our mindset that provides a path for more fully engaging with the healthcare ecosystem. One defining principal is the recognition that there is, indeed, an ecosystem that encompasses more than just a physician at point of care and today involves a complex set of inter-related stakeholders, all with unique communication needs that must strategically be addressed for optimal care.
Colleagues, you represent the center of healthcare communication and now enjoy the opportunity to create meaningful impact on how treatments are considered and delivered. My message to you is direct, simple, and powerful. Have PRIDE in your profession. The work that you do is highly intentional and represents a deliberate effort to ethically deliver a strong peer-review publication but also involves our evolved responsibility to consider how evidence will actually be used in patient care. There has never been a better time to be a medical publications and communications professional. Take pride in your profession!
Our theme for the 19th Annual Meeting of ISMPP is, appropriately, “Patients First” and represents a full acknowledgement that healthcare now prioritizes the role of patients in their own treatment. Beyond this, our theme is a testament that our profession is far more outcomes focused than ever before in considering how the planted seed of a peer-review publication will blossom into communications that will be appreciated by a myriad of stakeholders in best providing care for patients.
As always, I am grateful for the many talented delegates of our profession who champion the evolution of our field every day. Similarly, I am thankful for the strategic contribution of the ISMPP Board of Trustees, our numerous volunteers, and our dedicated ISMPP staff. Thank you to all who embrace passion and continue to drive our profession to new levels of achievement and impact.
I echo Rob in applauding all medical communications professionals who are standing at the forefront of a shift in how we think about our profession! We are engaging in ways to propel us forward from a base of leading ethical peer-reviewed publications to a future of thinking about the multiple stakeholders requiring evidence that may be used in patient care. The integration of these stakeholders, including time poor specialists, generalists, payers, allied healthcare professionals, and lay audiences such as patients and caregivers, creates a need for strategic planning with omnichannel approaches to reach each stakeholder at the right time and with the appropriate type of evidence. Patients are a unique stakeholder; we must remember that they are not a defined segment as they are highly varied and have individualized ways of seeking and finding medical information. As we look to the future, we need to look for strong ways to capture the patient voice in our communications while maintaining a high level of integrity, ethics, and respect.
Open access and digitized publication enhancements, such as video abstracts, podcasts, and publications plain language summaries (to name a few), are useful tools in the pockets of many. New technologies, such as large language artificial intelligence, will need to be understood and properly and ethically integrated into our repository of tools. Looking into the near future, we can already see our profession engaging in greater strategic planning and prioritization that is far more deliberate in considering multiple communication channels.
The level of sophistication and skill of our profession continues to evolve as we think about the specific medical communication needs of these multiple audiences and channels for communication. Ongoing awareness and education to keep current with these changes is critical. ISMPP continues to play a key role to empower our profession to be ready for the challenge. Thank you to all medical communication professionals for passion in all that you do! It is, indeed, a very exciting and rewarding time to be a part of this evolving field!!
