What is content reuse vs content repurposing
Content reuse is the practice of creating one piece of content and then using that piece of content everywhere you need it. A reused piece of content is created, finalized, translated, managed, stored, and retired one, and only one, time.
Content reuse enables you create the dossier in less time, at a reduced cost. It’s how you scale operations to provide the vast amount of interrelated content that must accompany every molecule, at each stage of that molecule’s lifecycle.
Content reuse is not something you can start on an ad-hoc basis. You need up-front planning to determine which content to reuse, how to reuse it, and how to manage it within and across organizations.
The most effective way to leverage content reuse is to plan for reuse.
Content reuse reduces the time and cost of content development. Content reuse also improves quality and reduces risk by ensuring consistency, accuracy, and adherence to standards.
When you reuse content, you write, edit, and approve the content one time. This means you say the same thing the same way everywhere you need to provide that information. This consistency makes it much easier for reviewers to find and comprehend the information.
Content reuse is not the same thing as content repurposing. Content repurposing involves copying and pasting (and usually tweaking) content. There is no copy, paste, and tweak with content reuse. With content reuse, the exact same content “object” is reused in every document that needs it. If the content changes, that single object is updated. The updates are then available to every document that references that object.
The differences between content reuse and content repurposing directly impact the business. With content repurposing, each copy/paste operation adds risk. Did every character get copied over correctly?
Each copy, paste, and tweak operation also adds time. Did the author’s tweaks improve the chances of regulators accepting the information without query? If the regulator does query the information, there are now two places to find and update the information: the original content and the pasted, repurposed content. It can be difficult to find the repurposed information if the terminology or syntax changed.
With content reuse, only the single source needs to be located and updated.
Why Reuse Content?
A drug dossier contains an enormous amount of interrelated content. Without content reuse, it is very challenging to provide the right information in the right place everywhere that information is required. Without content reuse, most organizations are forced to attempt one or more of the following tactics:
- Create entirely new content
- Create redundant content through copy, paste, and tweak
- Use cross-references to point to source information
- Create summaries of existing content and use cross-references to point to details
Each of these tactics has drawbacks, including:
- Redundant content wastes time and money to create, review, manage, translate, and retire
- Redundant content interferes with findability
- Cross-references send reviewers away with no obvious path back to where they started
Most pharma companies look to content reuse as a way to speed up the creation and finalization of individual documents as well as the full submission.
Content reuse is also becoming important to the evolution of the submission process. As regulators come to accept (or require) content submitted in more granular pieces rather than waiting for full dossiers or full documents to be complete, pharma companies can no longer rely on cross-references to connect content. It is much better to provide the information that is needed, at the time and place where it is needed.
Types Of Content Reuse
The most common types of content reuse are:
- Component – A single building block of information
- Element – A single paragraph, table, or figure
- Variable – A single data point, word, or phrase
- Component set – An assembly of components organized into a hierarchy
- Document – Reuse an entire document as part of a larger document
- Template – Reuse templated content into a working document
- Condition – Automate inclusion/exclusion of content based on conditional metadata
Each of these types of content reuse can be implemented in different ways. Most mature component structured content management systems provide all these types of content reuse.
The different types of content reuse are suited to different types of content. Each organization must consider how the types of content reuse differ from each other. The best path forward depends upon the requirements of the content, the business processes for how people work, and the system capabilities.
For example, component reuse is the simplest type of reuse to configure. Authors can easily insert reused components wherever they need to provide the information. Component reuse can be automated by configuring templates that reference reused content.
Condition reuse is a more complex type of reuse to configure. Condition reuse provides powerful automation for creating many variations of the same document. For example, conditional reuse enables you to automatically produce a different variant of a Stability Data report for each region where the drug product is manufactured.
Condition reuse takes significant planning and additional configuration efforts compared to component reuse. Some companies choose to incorporate condition reuse as a later phase of their structured content adoption while others do not use it at all.
With so many ways to reuse content, it can be challenging to figure out which way to use for any given content. Content Rules has developed a set of best practices and evaluation criteria for helping our customers determine the best ways to reuse content.
What Content Gets Reused
Pharma content offers many opportunities for content reuse. Even today, pharma companies have several documents that can be reused in multiple submissions. With digital transformation, structured content, and component-based reuse, pharma companies can get much more granular and derive much greater benefit than simply reusing full documents.
Here are just a few examples of content reuse for pharma:
- Quality/CMC
- Clinical
- Labeling
- Medical Information
- Commercial
Quality/CMC
The content reuse opportunities in CMC come mainly from the ability to reuse standardized, templated components to produce several variations of working documents. Content created in quality reports for module 3 can also be reused in summary reports for module 2.
Clinical
Eligibility criteria, study rationale, study objectives and endpoints, and the schedule of assessments can be reused in the protocol, protocol synopsis, clinical study report, and clinical study report synopsis. Safety and efficacy content can be reused between clinical study reports and the summary of safety and efficacy reports.
Labeling
Almost all labeling content can be reused from content created “upstream.” Therapeutic indication, dosage form and strength, use in specific populations, adverse reactions, drug-drug interactions, and other content can typically be reused into several regional labels.
The company core data sheet is essentially a repository of reusable content. Today, the core data sheet is typically maintained as a document that authors can copy from. With structured content management, the information in the core data sheet can be managed as a set of reusable components, eliminating the need to copy and paste the information manually.
Medical Information
The med info team often delivers the same information in multiple formats, ranging from presentations to documents to websites. The standard response document (or standard response letter) typically provides safety information and includes the entire package insert – two sets of information that could be reused not only by appending an entire document but by extracting relevant components and reusing them wherever the information is needed. With rising demand for sophisticated, AI-based chatbots and mobile apps, med info teams are on the hook to deliver more focused information more quickly in more formats. Content reuse is key to enabling med info teams with the ability to provide highly personalized information that relates to the patient at the point of care.
Commercial
Pharma marketing content must meet a complex set of regional and international regulatory requirements while still telling a compelling story for patients or health care professionals. Content reuse enables marketing teams to provide the right information at the right time on the right device – while meeting all regulatory requirements for that region, audience, and type of information.
What Is A Content Reuse Strategy
You get the most ROI from content reuse when you approach it from a strategic perspective. A reuse strategy is a plan for which content you will reuse, how you will reuse it, and where you will reuse it.
Think of content reuse the same way you think of electric standards or plumbing standards. You can buy any one of a thousand different kitchen faucets on the market, from any one of the various manufacturers, and it’s going to work in your kitchen. It works because ANSI standards define the diameter of the pipe, the number of threads, the types of materials, and other allowable characteristics. You can “reuse” different faucets in any kitchen because underlying standards make sure everything fits together properly.
A content reuse strategy identifies things such as:
- Which content is reused automatically
- Which content is reused manually
- What level of content can be reused
- Which mechanisms supply the reuse, such as variables and conditional logic to support “if/then” content reuse
- How reused content is managed
- Where content can be reused verbatim, without change from the original source
- Where content can be reused as a derivative, with some changes from the original source
While certain reuse best practices have been proven over time, there is no “one size fits all” for content reuse strategies. One of our pharma customers defined a reuse strategy for clinical reports that allows for reuse at the component and section level, but not for an individual paragraph or sentence. The CMC team at that same company defined reuse at the paragraph level in order to automate conditional text.
Regardless of how granular your level of reuse is, without a plan, your best efforts to scale content reuse will fail.
There’s more to content reuse than breaking long documents into pieces and then putting them back together. To successfully reuse content, you need to create content standards.
For reused content to flow seamlessly wherever it is used and to meet the requirements of the various documents, the content must be written with reuse in mind. The organization must adopt standards for how content is written, how much content to include in each component, and what order to include the information in. Authors must follow those standards so that content can be reused automatically, without additional curation by humans.
How To Automate Content Creation Using Content Reuse
Content reuse is the basis of several types of content automation in pharma. In fact, content reuse and automation are so closely related, it’s almost impossible to do one without the other. Much of content automation depends on a well-defined content reuse strategy.
Here are some examples of how we help pharma customers automate content creation through content reuse.
- Create authoring templates that automatically provide reused content when authors create new documents
- Enable authors to create closely related documents simultaneously by building planned reuse into authoring templates
- Build a library of reusable components that can be inserted into documents automatically or manually wherever needed
- Design reuse maps, conditions, and metadata models to support dynamic assembly of working documents
- Develop variable definitions files to reuse small units of information across a wide array of documents from a single source of truth
- Develop output formats that automate formatting, navigation, and cross-reference links so that the same content can be reused in multiple outputs
A pharma content reuse strategy needs to be robust enough to support different types of automation while still meeting all the requirements of the content.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
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