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 huge umbrella term under which numerous different types and subtypes of document creation can fall, including areas related to pharmacovigilance, regulatory, and scientific, just to name a few. Oftentimes, a healthcare professional (HCP) will want written documentation regarding answering 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 the medical literature and client internal sources. We also assist clients with 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 HCP 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 and how to get there is as varied as clients we service. 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. Now there is movement towards using more visuals (figures, tables) in response letters, although there is conflict between using more visually appealing content and making these documents appear more commercial rather than medical-science.
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 desire for more healthcare information in many forms (infographics, chatbots, dynamic, etc.) and the inability to keep up with all of the new data being generated. 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. Briefer documents rather than providing everything is what is craved more these days, which allows HCPs less time to digest information so they can make quicker decisions for their patients.
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 all 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 different 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 documents to suit their needs. In addition, we have collaborated with our UK colleagues in the past for special projects which required a great amount of work over a fixed amount of time, thereby bringing our collective capabilities to situations. We continue to look at ways to innovate and make things run smoother, such as exploring the possibility of artificial intelligence incorporated into our writing. And having worked with so many clients, we remain flexible to what and how the client wants the final written response documents to look.
