Barriers to finding and accessing information in the standard response document can directly impact a patient’s quality of life. When information is missing or difficult to understand, a healthcare provider (HCP) might assume that the medicine is not relevant to the patient they are treating. A payor might reject the coverage of that medicine.
A worse outcome occurs when due to gaps or barriers in the content, the HCP prescribes a medicine that does not help or even causes harm to the patient.
Limitations of Document-Based Standard Responses
Healthcare professionals increasingly report that when they refer to a standard response document about a drug product, the document often does not contain information relevant to their exact need.
Even when the document does contain the relevant information, the information is often difficult to find quickly. It’s especially difficult to find or trust information if updates are provided as new PDF files (rather than as a website or portal that is always kept up to date). If the healthcare organization does not replace their old PDF with the new one, then an HCP may miss updates that apply to their patient.
The problem gets worse when the user is accessing content on a mobile device. Smaller screens make it particularly difficult for HCPs to access information provided in tables or images that do not adapt to the pocket size or portrait orientation.
It’s not just standard response documents, of course. This lack of relevance and barrier to findability is a common theme for almost all traditional document-based information.
Why Do Standard Response Documents ‘Suddenly’ Fail to Deliver?
It’s not that standard response documents have gotten worse. In fact, thanks to the ease and speed of digital communications, medical information teams have more insight into what their users need than ever before. Medical writers are providing crucial information as quickly and comprehensively as possible.
The change is that everyone – including HCPs and patients — have developed much higher expectations for interacting with content. We expect content to be easy to find. Even better, we expect relevant content to find us.
No matter how much document navigation we put into a PDF — tables of contents, indexes, running headers, cross-references, subheadings, Ctrf-F, and so forth – it’s never going to be as useful as entering a search query and receiving an answer.
With the recent public availability of ChatGPT, our expectations are rising even further. How many times recently have you asked ChatGPT a question instead of entering a phrase into Google search? But even ChatGPT can only provide reliable answers if it has access to reliable information.
So how do we break free of documents and keep our medical information relevant, current, and findable? We employ structured content.
Structured Content Is the Solution
Structured content is a way of creating content as a set of modular building blocks of information. These modular building blocks are called “components.” Each component answers one question or conveys one idea, complete with all necessary data and references.
These components can then be combined to create documents. They can also be used in slide decks and published to websites, portals, chatbots, and mobile apps.
Each component also includes a set of metadata tags that enable search engines and other applications to find and deliver highly focused information quickly. This metadata makes it possible to filter information and deliver relevant content to HCPs.
If you’ve ever compared your Amazon home page to someone else’s Amazon home page, you’ve seen the results of metadata-driven filtering. That’s the personalized experience that raised expectations for an entire generation and all their progeny.
Structured content is the only way to provide personalized experiences at scale. Personalized experiences can in turn have a direct impact on the quality of care for patients.
How Structured Content Benefits Patients
When HCPs can find relevant information quickly, they can make better decisions with patients about what medications to use and the various risks and benefits associated with those treatments. The more closely the medical information matches the patient’s situation, the more valuable that content will be.
With structured content, medical information teams can create more specific content and tag it for findability. The efficiencies gained through content reuse, automated formatting, and metadata tagging frees up capacity for the team to focus on adding content that has direct impact on patients’ lives
It’s time to change how we provide our standard response information. While we may still provide PDFs for ease of printing hardcopy, we also need to offer a much more personalized experience for HCPs.
Where To Start
Structured content management and personalized content delivery are possible for medical information teams. Pharma companies may even have some of these technologies available in-house, particularly on the commercial side of the business.
The technology that enables structured content and personalization has reached a level of maturity that makes it adoptable for even highly regulated industries like pharma. Content Rules has developed methodologies and best practices to help ensure a successful transformation to structured content with the least amount of disruption.
Everyone wants the information they want, when they want it, on the device they’re using at the time. Healthcare professionals are no different. They especially need accurate, relevant information quickly when they are accessing it at the point of care. Medical information teams are ready to provide this level of service. Content Rules is poised to help you get there.
