Mind Your Own Business with a Year-End Review

By Laura J. Ninger, ELS, Ninger Medical Communications, LLC

You must understand what your medical communication business has achieved during the past year in order to plan for the future. This blog helps you review your earnings, clients, project mix, and marketing efforts with good record-keeping and some simple tables and graphs.

What Are the Most Important Medical Writer Qualifications?

Writers and editors with a passion for medicine and science are exploring opportunities in the growing field of medical writing.

The explosive growth of health care technology, pharmaceuticals, and other related areas creates multiple possible entry points for writers and editors who possess the skills and qualifications to enter and advance in the field.

What Are the Grant Components Required for an NIH Grant?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests more than $32 billion per year in biomedical research, making it the largest public funder of such research in the world. 

The NIH reviews approximately 80,000 applications each year; approximately 20% of those receive funding.

What Does It Take to Be a Medical Editor? Exploring Editing Careers

Every quality document requires the attention of a thorough editor, and medical and scientific documents require extra care to uphold scientific rigor. 

Telling It Like It Is: Informed Consent in Health Care

By Charlotte Crowder, MPH, ELS, Freelance Medical Writer and Editor

Use these tips to help medical writers create plain language, ethically sound informed consent documents with easy-to-read formats for participants in investigative clinical trials.

Best Practices for Writing CME Needs Assessments

By Donald Harting, MA, MS, ELS, CHCP, President, Harting Communications LLC, Downingtown, PA, and Ruwaida Vakil, MSc, Principal, ProMed Write LLC, Somerset NJ

A needs assessment (NA) is any passage of text that documents the need for instruction on a particular topic among physicians and other health care professionals. This NA may also be called a gap analysis. Normally the NA is just one part of a larger document, often called a CME grant proposal. Typically this larger document will also include sections on budget, audience generation, and outcomes analysis (Figure 1). A proposal for an accredited activity will also contain some indication of how many continuing education credits may be awarded and information about the organization awarding credit. These additional sections are NOT included in this blog.