ISMPP Annual 2024

Oxford PharmaGenesis is global, award-winning and independent. Our unique HealthScience approach combines audience insights, best practice in omnichannel communications and proven behaviour change techniques to maximize your impact. From Medical Affairs to Market Access, join us to explore new frontiers.

Continue reading

Bobby's recap: navigating the European Meeting of ISMPP as a Senior Medical Writer at Oxford PharmaGenesis

The 2024 European meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP), held on 23–24 January 2024, saw professionals from all areas of medical communications gather in the Novotel London West to shelter from some quintessentially British weather. I started working at Oxford PharmaGenesis only a couple of months before the world locked down in response to COVID-19, so this was my first chance to attend a conference in person, and it was a great experience! From attending inspiring keynote sessions to reading the different research presented in the poster hall, ISMPP Europe was full of brilliant opportunities to learn and grow.

One of the first sessions of the event was a plenary session titled ’Medcomms 2030: A Blue Sky and Black Cloud Perspective’. Moderated by Jocelyn Woodcock of Caudex, this session saw James Dathan (AstraZeneca), clad in an incredibly daring suit with a blue-sky print, present an optimistic view of how our industry might have changed for the better by the year 2030. This was countered by Bethany Whalley (Novo Nordisk), who presented a more cynical and pessimistic view of how things might have changed for the worse. Will generative artificial intelligence (AI) enhance public access to science through the creation of plain language summaries, or will it be used to output lazy, factually misleading content with little human oversight? Will the role of patients as authors evolve to be the industry standard, or will perceptions of bias and pharma meddling shut down the patient voice? Although the presentation was hugely speculative, it was still interesting to consider the challenges the industry will face in the years to come.

Another highlight of the conference was a session on ’Humanizing AI & Building Trust’. Presented by Nell Watson of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, this session gave a broad-strokes overview of the history of AI and how it is poised to change not just medical communications, but all areas of science and medicine. The session highlighted both the opportunities that AI presents us and the perils that it might pose, including ‘shadow AI’ being used without disclosure, leaks that could result from improper use of large language models, and questions and concerns about intellectual property rights when using generative AI. As everybody scrambles to get ahead of the curve on AI, it’s important to bear in mind the problems that it can present.

Another plenary session titled ’From Blue Sky to Bottom Line: Getting Innovation Off the Ground’ presented two case studies of innovative projects – both of which were supported by Oxford PharmaGenesis. One project showed results from a pilot study using machine learning algorithms to speed up systematic literature reviews. Another project focused on developing a framework to guide involving patients as authors and reviewers on pharma-sponsored publications – a project that I was involved in developing alongside our client! It was for this second project that I was also co-author on a poster presented at the event, a particular point of pride given it was the first publication of any type that had my name in the byline! You can view the poster here.

Probably coming as a surprise to nobody, one of the prevailing themes of the conference was the role of AI in our industry. Many presenters discussed the topic of AI, and the poster hall contained many presentations on the topic. Presenters had trialled the use of AI to streamline literature reviews, create and improve plain language summaries, and predict and maximize the impact of an article before publication. Although we’re all still brainstorming ideas to figure out how best to utilize AI, it’s clear that the technology has potential. Indeed, the change has already begun: the first draft of this very article was written by prompting our in-house AI tool Paige – followed, of course, by successive refinement by my capable human hands! As you’ll no doubt have heard by now, AI is here to stay, but it’s up to us to make sure that it’s used in the right way.

On the whole, ISMPP Europe was a lovely experience. It was a chance to deepen my understanding of the industry and meet clients face to face, breaking down that screen barrier. Although it’s wonderful to read positive feedback in emails from clients, nothing quite compares to getting to have a chat with another human in person! It was also a great chance to read some posters and get some inspiration for my own work. Hopefully, if I can put this inspiration into practice, it can help me to deliver much more impactful poster designs.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Oxford PharmaGenesis (@oxpharmagenesis)

ISMPP Europe 2024

Oxford PharmaGenesis is global, award winning and independent. Our unique HealthScience approach uses proven behaviour change techniques to maximize the impact of your communications and to ensure they resonate with the target audience. Talk to us to learn how we can help you improve collaboration, innovation, and strategy and planning.

Continue reading

MAPA–MAPS Medical Affairs Summit 2023: highlights report

This year’s Medical Affairs Professionals of Australasia (MAPA) and Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) Medical Affairs Summit was held from 8 to 10 November 2023 in Sydney, Australia.

Continue reading

Find us at ISPOR Europe 2023

HEOR and market access are evolving, with big changes in HTA around the corner, acceleration in the use of RWE and increased reactions to cost-containment measures. We are contributing to conversations about how these changes affect value demonstration strategies. At Oxford PharmaGenesis, we are experts in advising on payer strategy, developing payer evidence and supporting payer evaluation. We understand differences in payer evidence needs, and we know how to create compelling value stories for our clients that achieve powerful results.

Continue reading

ISMPP Academy report: Oxford PharmaGenesis teaches how to elevate publications through enhanced impact and demystifies RWE and HEOR

More than 150 medical publications professionals gathered in Philadelphia on 28–29 September 2023 for the inaugural ISMPP Academy. Oxford PharmaGenesis was a key event sponsor and we were delighted to give two valuable presentations to help attendees to explore new frontiers in publications.

In line with the ISMPP Academy theme ‘PREP! Practical Resources to Elevate Publications’, Oxford PharmaGenesis colleagues Richard White (Chief Operating Officer) and Tomas Rees (Director of Innovation), along with Leah Bensimon (Director, Scientific Publications at Bristol Myers Squibb) presented talks covering new ways of thinking about publication impact, and explaining the basics of real-world evidence (RWE) and health economics and outcomes research (HEOR).

If you missed the talks or need a reminder of the content, here are some of the key takeaways from both.

New ways of thinking about impact

In their talk ‘New ways of thinking about impact’, Tomas Rees and Leah Bensimon explored the best way to break away from traditional, linear publications planning and embrace different options to expand reach.

The talk promised to help attendees to apply new strategies to increase the reach and impact of publications plans, identify the best methods for analytics and collecting metrics, demonstrate value when requesting more resources, and more.

Presenters Tomas and Leah described why we need metrics, explaining that they help us to get a better understanding of the value of publications and how they contribute to ethical commitments, support product launches, shape treatment practice and advance the science.

They then looked at the kind of insights needed to demonstrate value, exploring types of publications and how they are used by the field team for medical information and market access and so on.

Tomas and Leah introduced ways to measure impact and outlined the difference between quantitative and qualitative metrics. They then addressed how to use article-level metrics to evaluate different kinds of impact and went on to explore how using metrics across articles at scale can provide a variety of insights, such as level-setting and prediction, gap analysis and areas of research activity.

Tomas looked at using AI techniques to evaluate the literature, explore topics and obtain qualitative insights. He said AI can help us analyse large amounts of data and find patterns, trends and relationships that we might otherwise miss. He gave some examples of how AI can help us with topic modelling, sentiment analysis, text summarization and more.

They also presented ways to think about increasing the impact of publications, such as publication enrichments and extensions, and explored some of the opportunities and barriers to using social media to communicate publications.

The session finished with case studies. Tomas presented work carried out with Ipsen that benchmarked and assessed all their publications so that the company could see impact levels across products, publication types and other publication characteristics. Leah presented a case study using sentiment analysis social media discussions to assess the impact of a publication addressing potential safety concerns.

The basics of RWE and HEOR for publications professionals

With the fields of RWE and HEOR changing on an almost daily basis, Richard White’s presentation at the ISMPP Academy provided a timely overview of the field and an update for publications professionals on the latest guidance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR)-International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) and other groups on best practices for the planning, design, execution and communication of RWE and HEOR studies. A packed session with 52 attendees and standing-room only attested to the continued interest of ISMPP members in the application of RWE and HEOR in clinical decision-making.

Richard opened by emphasizing the importance of understanding and respecting the ‘why’ of RWE and HEOR teams – their perspectives, work and goals – in order to build a collaborative working relationship. Best practice should include a joint RWE/HEOR/medical/publications stakeholder workshop to co-create communications plans and build contingencies, ensuring compliance with Good Publication Practice (GPP) and agreement on preferred document templates and writing guidelines/checklists.

In the second part of the session, Richard focused on the inherent differences between RWE studies and RCTs, including issues such as complex stakeholder involvement, uncertainty over data sufficiency, fundamental limitations of the data and target journal selection. This was followed by a summary of external challenges to the credibility of industry-sponsored RWE and HEOR studies, and how trust in these can be built through transparency by using newly established reporting registries, guidelines and checklists.

Finally, Richard encouraged attendees to add value through their own medical communications expertise. Publication enhancements, plain language summaries (PLS), animations and videos, and plain language summaries of publications (PLSPs) are hugely important tools that should be used to explain RWE and HEOR studies, because this is an area in which most healthcare professional and patient audiences have little basic understanding.

The session included an opportunity for audience questions, which went beyond the session and into the lunch-break. Topics discussed included the following.

• The challenge of modelling health benefits over a lifetime when health insurance companies consider a much shorter budget horizon.
• The complexities of determining authorship of HEOR studies and when clinical experts should be involved to meet ICMJE criteria.
• Requests from journals for access to RWE study data when such data are owned by a third-party vendor.
• The growing number of methodologies to correct for bias in RWE studies, such as propensity score matching, matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC), inverse treatment probability weighting (ITPW) and others.

Interested in exploring new frontiers to increase the impact of publications, or learning more about RWE and HEOR? Get in touch with Oxford PharmaGenesis for a chat