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AI, Storytelling, and the Future of Medical Publishing: Highlights from ISMPP’s 20th Annual Meeting
Written on Monday, May 20, 2024
On the last Monday of April 2024, the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) welcomed more than 700 attendees to its 20th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. OPEN Health sent one of the largest contingents to the meeting with 14 attendees, including executive leaders, writers, marketing professionals, business development specialists, and creative leaders to learn, share, and connect with others in the medical publications industry.
Rob Matheis, ISMPP President and CEO, opened the meeting by celebrating ISMPP’s growth in membership and influence over the past two decades. He noted that ISMPP membership has grown from 152 members in the organization’s first year to approximately 2500 today. He emphasized ISMPP’s role in establishing and refining the policies and best practices that define the industry and the organization’s commitment to open and transparent communication between life science companies, communications agencies, publishers, and patient advocacy organizations to ensure accurate and accessible scientific communications for all.
With a meeting theme of “Storytelling: Its Art and Power,” this year’s ISMPP meeting challenged attendees to envision a future in medical publishing that incorporates storytelling as a more effective and empathetic tool to engage and impact readers, while embracing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)/large language model AI to accelerate and simplify the medical publications process. These two themes were echoed through a range of keynote presentations, plenary talks, member-led roundtable sessions, and 77 poster presentations.
OPEN Health’s key take-home messages from the meeting included the following:
- The time is now to consider how AI/GenAI can best support our industry
- This meeting revealed tremendous enthusiasm for possible AI/GenAI applications in our industry; the ISMPP community is keen to understand more about how we can integrate AI with compliant practices for publication development
- ISMPP helped to assuage fears surrounding AI during their AI myth-busters plenary session, dispelling such myths as the introduction of bias to medical publications with AI or AI replacing medical writers. Speakers emphasized that medical writers will drive solutions for the future health of medical publishing and that AI-empowered writers will deliver next-generation medical publications
- As attendees assessed AI applications, the humanistic role remained a key focus. We may need to alter our approach to content reviews and data validation to ensure that we maintain the integrity of our publications
- OPEN Health’s assessment is firm – AI is here to stay, but so are humans. We are excited to embrace this evolution within our industry and have done our research
- OPEN Health medical writer, Adam Fishbein, presented research he co-authored with colleagues Anna Battershill and Lauren McNally, “Evaluating the quality of artificial intelligence-produced plain language summaries,” one of several posters supporting the feasibility of GenAI tools in drafting plain language summaries
- The persuasive power of storytelling can expand the reach and impact of medical publications
- Keynote speakers challenged attendees to adopt a different narrative form to better engage readers – starting the story from the middle, drawing readers back to the preceding “why,” and propelling them forwards to the consequence or conclusion – while maintaining data integrity and framing data so that their pertinence can be grasped and contextualized
- As readers may differ in the ways they best receive information, data visualization becomes an effective method to expand readership and retention. Across multiple sessions of the meeting, emphasis was placed on reducing “cognitive load” by embracing directness and clarity of language, eliminating unnecessary graphic noise, and refining to their essence the elements of the data portrayed (eg, reducing the number of labels in graphs or increasing contrast between colors)
- In data visualization, we should carefully consider the story of the data and the shape of that story, for example, do the data represent change over time? Is that change linear or nonlinear? Does the story include any other key variables?
- Again, OPEN Health is primed to be a leader in defining how storytelling and data visualization can benefit medical publishing
- Principal health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) writer, Eleanor Bush, expanded the conversation in her roundtable session “Science Friction: Using conflict to enrich stories in HEOR publications,” in which she discussed the importance of conflict or friction in propelling stories. While clinical narratives may benefit from the dynamic conflict inherent in randomized controlled trials, HEOR narratives must look further afield to structure compelling stories
- Medical writer, Corey Burgin, presented research she co-authored with Sean T. Anderson, Emilie Croisier, and Pallavi Patel. Their work, titled “Perceptions of publication extender utility and reliability: A survey of healthcare professionals,” showed that healthcare providers find publication extenders to be highly effective, particularly for increasing their own understanding of complex healthcare information and improving patient care
- We have a responsibility to amplify patient engagement in publication processes
- ISMPP’s commitment to the importance of the patient voice was evident by the inclusion of multiple plenary sessions that involved patients and patient advocates
- Publication extenders, such as plain language summaries and graphical abstracts, are valuable formats for reaching patients and their advocates, increasing their ability to make better informed decisions regarding their healthcare
- Patient involvement in publications is critical for all stakeholders to understand better wide-ranging concerns, such as burden of illness, patient beliefs and preferences, and treatment effects, thereby increasing quality and accuracy of publications
- By empowering patients with a voice in the research that affects their health and well-being, patient involvement fosters trust in publications, which in turn increases the scope for improved health outcomes
- OPEN Health’s Jasmine Malone discussed end-to-end patient involvement in her parallel session, covering ways in which patients may be included, how we can expand their inclusion, and approaches for representing diversity in patient voices while upholding best practices in publication development
- The program concluded with an awards ceremony celebrating the founding members of ISMPP. We took immense pride in seeing Carolyn Clark, former Chair of OPEN Health, receive her award for supporting the formation of ISMPP. OPEN Health remains a strong supporter of ISMPP to this day
As it enters its third decade, ISMPP continues to challenge its members to consider how we might better reach and engage different audiences through storytelling and streamlined infographics, while preparing for a future increasingly reliant on new and varied AI-assisted applications. As the 20th Annual Meeting of ISMPP closed, many attendees left with a healthy mix of skepticism and uncertainty about how storytelling and AI may impact our work in the not-too-distant future. However, coupled with curiosity and enthusiasm, this will no doubt fuel the disruption, innovation, and change needed to prepare us for a new era. At OPEN Health, we look forward to continuing this conversation with ISMPP, our internal team members, and you.
The OPEN Health team
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