International Society of Medical Publications Professionals Annual Meeting Highlights and Insights

The 21^st Annual Meeting of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals, held May 11-14, 2025, united more than 700 medical publication and communication professionals, patient advocates, medical and scientific writers and publishers and industry representatives to engage and ideate around this year’s meeting theme: “Diversity and Innovation: In Concert.”

The meeting focused on the power of varied perspectives and the importance of diversity in driving innovation. In keeping with the “in concert” theme, musical performance analogies were woven through the presentations and discussions to illustrate how collaboration can create harmony and transform communications to foster inclusivity and innovation.

Key meeting themes and implications

1. Collaboration in Medical Communications

• Collaboration among publishers, industry, healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients, and medical communications professionals is crucial to optimizing the impact of medical communications, and open communication is essential to finding common ground and promoting innovation. More and more, traditional firewalls are being broken down to encourage interaction and dialogue between all stakeholders involved in the data dissemination process.
  
• A key initiative that exemplifies this involves a group of publishers who came together to develop a Plain language summary finder tool that enhances discoverability and standardization of PLS/PLSPs forpublishers, authors, and readers.  The publication extender toolkit is another cross-publisher initiative that provides a unified approach and clear definitions to help streamline development and increase adoption of these high-impact assets that increase visibility and comprehension of scientific publications.
  
• These and other initiatives help overcome collaboration challenges by addressing variabilities in journal and publisher requirements, as well as providing clarity to help authors’ better understand what’s available to them to help distill and amplify their publications through publication extenders.
  
• Implications: Breaking traditional barriers fosters dialogue and innovation among stakeholders, including publishers, industry, HCPs, patients, and medical communication professionals. A unified approach streamlines processes, benefiting all involved. Open communication ensures the highest ethical standards. 

2. Generative AI (GenAI) in Medical Communications

• Rather than thinking in terms of keeping a “human in the loop” on the back end, it may be better to rethink how we keep “GenAI in the loop,” and retain an active role for humans in first draft development of a deliverable with GenAI being used to clean up, refine, and perform other tasks.
  
• Copyright language (even for open access journals) protects original works from adaptation, affecting GenAI use.  Several presenters indicated that lawsuits have been brought against OpenAI and other platform developers, so the landscape of what is/isn’t permissible appears to be in flux.  Some lawyers are advising companies that GenAI should not be used to draft content if a workflow entails uploading articles to a system and then having GenAI read and summarize.
  
• It is recommended that users check the copyright language of any document before upload into a platform to see if there may be restrictions (example: CC-BY-ND [Creative Commons license that allows others to share, copy, and distribute an original work, but prohibits any modifications, adaptations, or derivative works]). 
  
• Implications: Strategic investment in GenAI and digital tools that will enhance operational efficiency and overall capability is a clear emerging trend, and it is therefore critical for stakeholders involved in medical communications to share their experiences with GenAI and learn from each other to promote the most meaningful adoption of this powerful technology. Training programs on digital readiness and content automation can prepare teams for future challenges and improve engagement with stakeholders.

3. Patient Involvement in Medical Communications

• Enhancing patient involvement in and access to medical communications is critical to improving health literacy that will ultimately lead to better health outcomes.  Speakers highlighted the need to meet patients where they are, both in terms of the platforms they use (e.g., social media, online communities, publications, organizations, etc.) and their level of understanding. To be effective, medical information must be accessible and tailored to patients’ comprehension and needs. It also must be written in a way to promote inclusivity and clarity.
  
• Patients want their perspectives to be genuinely heard and incorporated, not sought as a token gesture or checked box. Authentic collaboration is essential, along with clear setting of expectations. Most patients are unfamiliar with the medical publication process, so offering training will help them better understand their role and support more effective engagement.
  
• Communicating clearly and empathetically to patient audiences is essential to meaningful patient engagement.   Laura Watts, Senior Medical Writer at Lumanity, presented Empathy as Innovation: Composing Empathetic Scientific Writing with Diverse Patient Perspectives in a poster and plenary presentation. The findings revealed uncovered a paucity of research exploring the role of empathy in medical communications, despite the clear link between empathy and patient satisfaction, treatment adherence, and clinical outcomes in health care.  A roundtable on this topic facilitated discussion around the most important characteristics of empathy in scientific writing: use of patient-first language and overall readability, highlighting the importance of patient inclusion and comprehension rose to the top, along with a lively debate around utilizing empathic writing across all scientific communications to resonate with HCPs as well as patients. 
  
• Implications: Effective engagement requires authentic collaboration and clear communication, enhancing health literacy and outcomes. Most patients are unfamiliar with the medical publication process, so offering training will help them better understand their role and support more effective engagement. Empathy and patient-first language in scientific writing are crucial for inclusion and comprehension, and Lumanity is developing a metric to measure empathy in writing that could provide a valuable tool to promote engagement and understanding.