Our "Meet the Expert" series introduces you to our team of experts around the world. This "behind the curtain" view will help you get to know who we are on a professional and personal level, and highlight how our colleagues work together on our higher purpose to improve patient health and safety throughout the complete product lifecycle.
Meet Collin Freeman, Medical Information Writing Supervisor
What do you do at ProPharma? How does your role support our higher purpose of improving the health and safety of patients?
I oversee a team of health professional writers that creates, revises, or updates documents connected with Medical Information services at ProPharma in addition to also being a medical information writer. Medical writing is a broad umbrella term under which numerous different types and subtypes of document creation can fall, including areas related to pharmacovigilance, regulatory sciences, and writing, just to name a few. Often, healthcare professionals (HCPs) will want written documentation in response to a question they submit to a pharmaceutical company's medical information service. My team and I create balanced, noncommercial, medically-related documentation directed specifically towards the HCP's question. The topics can be specific or general and pertain to the client's product(s). Sources used to create these documents include medical literature and client internal sources. We also assist clients in developing templates and client-specific style guides for writing standard and custom response letters.
My role contributes to ProPharma's higher purpose by providing written information about pharmaceutical products, in addition to any verbal responses they may have received, that aid the HCPs in their decision process of patient treatment.
What is one lesson you've learned in this industry that has most helped you?
The detail, depth, format, and style of any standard or customized written response, as well as the approach, vary as much as the clients we serve. Even the way in which we convey information, by words or visuals, is evolving and constantly changing. In earlier years, our writing output was primarily just text. Currently, there is a shift towards incorporating more visuals (figures, tables) in response letters, although a conflict arises between using visually appealing content and maintaining the document's medical-scientific nature.
What is a current trend you're seeing in the industry and how does it impact our clients and patients?
An ongoing trend is the increasing demand for healthcare information in various forms, such as infographics, chatbots, and dynamic content, which presents challenges in keeping up with the influx of new data. Not only is written documentation desired, but in order to digest and process new data, HCPs want the information in shorter bites. More bullet points and figures within a document that is 3 pages or less is becoming more of a norm due to the time-constraints HCPs often face in their professional workday. HCPs now prefer concise documents that provide key information, enabling them to make faster decisions for their patients with limited time for information digestion.
Tell us a little bit of yourself outside of work.
I am a husband and a father of a high schooler who has many interests and is involved in extracurricular activities throughout the school year. I enjoy traveling to places both old and new, watching movies, and playing various kinds of games. I started my career as a clinical pharmacist and have worked in a variety of settings, including hospitals, academia, corporate pharma, and consulting.
What value does a client gain by working with ProPharma's Medical Information Writing experts?
Clients can expect to have at their disposal a large breadth and depth of knowledge, thanks to the longevity and diversity in pharmacy-related careers of the writers (both from healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry). We have experience in medical information writing that has involved a variety of therapeutic disease states and products. Along with our other colleagues around the world, the number of clients we have served through the years with their variety of needs and requests gives us a large knowledge base of different ways we can create and revise medical information materials to suit their needs. In addition, we have collaborated with our UK colleagues for special projects which required a great amount of work over a fixed amount of time, thereby leveraging our collective capabilities in such situations. We continue to look at ways to innovate and make things run smoother, such as exploring the possibility of artificial intelligence integrated into our writing processes. And having worked with numerous clients, we are adaptable to the client's preferences and requirements for medical information materials.
