Why Best Practices are needed for Writing for Reuse?

Because without reuse, you cannot deliver content at scale or achieve efficiency
And if you products sell globally, you also start with best practices for writing global-ready content.
Here are four best practices that we recommend for any content standardization effort, along with the reasons why your audience and will appreciate your efforts.

1. Standardize terminology

Customers can understand your content quicker and better when you don’t keep switching words on them.
Reuse : Standardized terminology enables small chunks of content to fit together and flow seamlessly. It reduces ambiguity.

Global : Translation costs are per word. Using consistent words lowers cost.

2. Use consistent grammar and style

Customers can resonate with who you are as a company when all content is written by “the company” and not dozens of individual writers.
Reuse : Consistent grammar and style enable small chunks of content to fit together and flow seamlessly.

Global : Sentences must be grammatically correct for successful translation. Consistent grammar and style allow translators to work faster and produce more accurate results.

3. Say the same thing, the same way, everywhere you say it

Customers develop trust in your company when your content is consistent.
Reuse : Eliminate duplicated content and duplicated effort by adopting a reuse mindset. Write it once, review it once, approve it once, update it once, and then use it everywhere it is needed.

Global : Minimal amount of translation and maximum amount of exact or fuzzy matches significantly reduces translation cost. And, global customers also benefit from eliminating ambiguity from your content.

4. Reduce sentence length and complexity

Your Audience (whether HA, Regulators, HCPs or end consumers) brevity and simplicity. No one ever complained about a short, easy to read sentence.
Reuse : Short, clear sentences help create focused components. You can easily assemble short components into a longer work. Shorter, simple sentences are easier to understand.

Global : Short, clear sentences have more successful translation. They are also easier to understand for non-native speakers.

By following these 4 best practices, you can solve reuse problems and make your translations better, cheaper, and faster. Adapting a Structured content tool, can help automate these and gain significant efficiencies.

1. Time to Market

Medical device manufacturers are always under pressure to get their projects to the market as soon as possible. There are many content requirements for these devices. Medical device manufacturers need to speed up the time it takes to create, translate, review, and approve the content.

2. Similar yet Different Requirements

Health authorities & Notified Bodies around the world often have similar requirements. However, the order, format, and templates used can vary widely. Using standardized, structured content sets medical device manufacturers up for maximum reuse.

3. Reuse without Content Changes

Medical device content has a lot of reuse potential. In order to keep a single source of truth and avoid content drift, manufacturers need to reference small, format-free, reusable pieces, rather than copy / paste / tweak over and over.

4. Start with Approved Content by HA/NB

It is always best to start off with previously approved content. Chances are high that Regulators more likely to accept language that they approved in a previous submission.

5. Med Devices are Getting Smarter

Medical devices are getting smarter. Industry must move to standardized, structured content to accommodate the advances that are coming.

Know more

Many of the benefits of structured content roll up into one key business need: Scale and Productivity. The ability to produce a lot of content quickly, accurately, and by minimal efforts is a growing need for BioPharma companies which got accelerated during Covid times.

A Matter of Scale

Pharma companies produce truly high volume and variety of content. Some of this content includes vast amounts of data. Both data and content are produced by many people, in many sources of truth, over many months or years. Some of the projects are under tremendous time pressure to get this information out as quickly as possible without compromising its accuracy or missing a piece.

One of the primary ways that structured content enables companies to scale is through strategic content reuse . With structured content, you can eliminate unnecessary redundancy from your content and from your processes. Instead, you can reuse the exact right piece of content, everywhere you need to provide that exact right piece of information.

Pharma content has a lot of opportunity for content reuse. There’s reuse across Clinical reports. There’s reuse across Labeling. There’s reuse across CMC. All of which have high potential for content reuse.

With the right reuse foundation, strategy and system support, much of this reuse can be automated. So can the flow of data into the content. So can the assembly, formatting, and production of the final document. Structured content and strategic content reuse allow you to streamline content operations at every stage, from creation through review, revision, approval, updates, and archive.

While pharma content would have benefited from structure from the beginning, pharma companies could not afford to take the risk of transforming their content operations to an entirely different content paradigm moving away from MS Word. Now you have options as described above.

Why Is Medical/Regulatory Content So Challenging?

Teams face the same content challenges as any other industry, and then some.

Here are some common scenarios everyone shares:

• Takes too long to create, approve, and deliver content
• Cannot leverage or reuse content across documents
• Cannot leverage or share content across organizational silos
• Cannot manage the high volume of variations and versions
• Wasted time in manual formatting and reformatting of content
• Wasted time in “copy, paste, and tweak” of old content

 
And here are some additional scenarios that keep content teams up at night:

Time – Teams are under time pressure to produce right content as part of getting their products to market or staying compliant

Data – A large portion of content must be accompanied by or simply is data. Data is so essential to content that an entire software industry has emerged to provide databases and data governance systems just for managing this data.

Productivity – Volume increasing every year

It’s About Time

Structured content is no longer in its infancy. Some of BioPhama companies have adopted (and few more in process) to structured content (either fully or hybrid in combination with MS Word), transforming content from a slow and expensive burden to a fast and valuable asset. They have even successfully expanded their content strategies and structured content management systems to multiple organizational silos.

Thanks in part to these early adopters, the structured content ecosystem has stabilized. With hybrid models, teams that don’t want to fully move to Structured-content can also adapt now keeping best of both worlds (online and offline with MS Word).

Every company that has experienced a digital transformation knows that it’s not as simple as rolling out a new system and telling everyone to use it. Yet if you do it right define your business requirements, develop your strategy, implement your tools, and support people with excellent change management the business reaps benefits right from the start. Incremental wins along the way help keep everyone motivated to stay on the path.

It’s the same with content transformation. As you move into structured content at last, they stand to reap benefits from the very beginning. Each incremental win helps build momentum toward even bigger future wins.