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 Michael Church, Vice President, Medical Writing
What do you do at ProPharma? How does your role support our higher purpose of improving the health and safety of patients?
As Vice President of Medical Writing, I am dedicated to ensuring my team delivers the highest quality functional service provider (FSP) medical writing solutions, customized and tailored to each client's needs. We take the time to understand our client's portfolio, identify the gaps and pain points in their current resourcing strategy, and identify the best possible resources to address their areas of concern. At the same time, I am currently leading our medical writing technology initiatives, focusing on developing the best tools that leverage the latest developments in AI and automation to streamline the medical writing process. Our end goal is to create a mix of best-in-class medical writing talent and a tech-enabled platform to deliver solutions to clients that expedite the regulatory submission process and ultimately deliver life-saving products more quickly to patients.
What is one lesson you've learned in this industry that has most helped you?
The ability and willingness to propose delivery models that are flexible and agile have been critical to successful delivery to our clients. Medical writing deliverables are notoriously difficult to forecast accurately; unforeseen changes in clinical timelines and unpredictable drop-in work happen frequently, which impact resourcing needs. By leveraging both our excellent ProPharma clinical recruitment team and our Planet Pharma staffing division, we are able to provide creative solutions that blend both fully client-dedicated medical writing resources with additional flexible staff for ad hoc resourcing needs that can easily scale up or down to meet the changing needs of a medical writing portfolio.
What's your number one goal/focus right now?
Lately I have been very focused on working with our technology group to develop a suite of tools that can increase our productivity in medical writing and deliver novel solutions to our clients. Not being a "tech guy" myself, learning how to help our talented software team translate our processes into the appropriate architecture for a technology platform has been fascinating. Ultimately, the reward will be in providing cost-saving solutions to our clients that help them reduce their timelines and get critical medicines to market faster.
What do you like best about working with clients?
I have been in leadership roles within clinical research organizations for over 18 years, and I can honestly say working directly with clients has been some of the best moments of my career. Getting to know them and to understand what their challenges are helped foster some professional relationships that have lasted for years. There is always a deep sense of satisfaction of being able to work with them on a problem, provide a solution, and receive positive acknowledgement for a job well done.
What is unique about our culture at ProPharma?
We have a uniquely supportive culture at ProPharma. While we are extremely dedicated to providing support to our clients, we are also supportive of each other internally to ensure that we are able to meet our goals. The leadership here works hard to make sure that staff have everything they need to provide quality services to our clients, and we provide mentorship, training and development opportunities to foster our team’s personal, professional growth. I'm always impressed by the team's willingness to jump in and help a fellow writer or editor when they are in a crunch to ensure that we produce timely, high-quality deliverables for our partners.
