4 Reasons Clinical Experience Makes You a Better CME Medical Writer(and Tips for Getting Started)
Healthcare professionals with a flair for the written word have a leg up in CME.
Are you a healthcare professional thinking about moving from clinical practice to medical writing or Continuing Medical Education / Continuing Education for Health Professionals (CME/CEHP)? Perhaps you are keen on generating additional income, or you want to take a break from the hectic and stressful healthcare setting — or maybe you’re seeking to fulfill a long-standing interest and affinity for writing.
No matter the reason, if you’re considering becoming a CME writer, good news! Clinical experience is an incredibly valuable asset in the CME field, so chances are you have a head start.
Let’s explore how you can leverage your clinical experience to enhance your CME writing abilities. We’ll also look at other skills that may help you in your career as a CME medical writer.
Special thanks to Esther Langmack, MD, Principal and Owner of Langmack Medical Communications LLC, for sharing her insights on episode 46 of the Write Medicine podcast on how clinicians can pivot to a fulfilling career in medical writing, which contributed to this article.
Continuing Medical Education Writers with Clinical Experience Understand Their Audience
It is easiest to write content that resonates with your audience when you have a deep understanding of their pressing needs and issues.
While someone without clinical experience must imagine what their audience is thinking, feeling, and experiencing (and may often miss the mark!), you can easily put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Why? Simply because you were your audience not too long ago (or perhaps still are)!
By drawing on your own first-hand experience of operating in clinical settings, you can easily adapt your audience’s perspective and write more effective content for CME projects, a key skill for anyone in senior medical writer positions.
Furthermore, as someone with clinical experience, you have a clear understanding of the context for which CME content is designed. Healthcare professionals operate in dynamic situations requiring quick decision-making and constantly have to make risk assessments in diagnosing and treating patients. With this profound understanding of the needs of CME learners, you will be able to write better CME content that captures relevant information in a practical and applicable way.
Medical Writers with a Clinical Background Understand How Healthcare Providers Learn
Physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and other allied health professionals have often been on the receiving end of CME content. If you decide to go into medical writing, you get to carry insights about your learning experience with you. By reflecting on your own experience as a learner, you will be able to appraise what kind of content works well and what falls flat, an essential aspect of refining your writing needs.
This unique perspective about how healthcare professionals learn and what their expectations are when they enter into a learning activity puts you in the perfect position to create engaging CME content.
CME Writers with Clinical Experience Are Proficient in Medical Information and Terminology
Science (and medicine, in particular) has a very specific language. It has its own unique vocabulary and technical terms, which can present a steep learning curve for writers from a non-medical background.
As someone with a background in clinical practice, you have been immersed in this field for years. Not only does that offer an advantage in terms of being able to read and understand medical journals or relevant publications to create CME content, but you are also able to use the necessary language confidently, clearly, and correctly. This alone gives you an added boost if you are considering switching gears from a clinical practice to a career in medical writing.
CME Writers with a Healthcare Background Have Honed Their Professional Research Skills
In your time in clinical practice, you have surely read and reviewed more than your fair share of research studies, medical journals, and white papers to make informed decisions about patient care. As a CME medical writer in the CEHP space, this experience will come in handy.
An integral part of creating content for CME is being able to search medical literature and pull out relevant information. Medical writers also need to be able to ask experts in the field thoughtful questions, discuss quantitative data, and interpret statistical outcomes. Being able to synthesize all this information in a way that is easily digestible and useful to learners is of utmost importance. These are all skills that healthcare professionals learn in the course of their clinical practice that can be transferred over to CME medical writing.
Regardless of your medical specialty, the skills you acquire in your clinical practice can be applied to different areas of CME, CEHP, and medical writing, with a special focus on meeting the writing needs of your audience. By approaching different opportunities with curiosity and a problem-solving mindset, you will find that many skills from your clinical experience apply to a career in CME medical writing.
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3 Tips for Starting Your CME Medical Writing Career
Apart from the competencies you bring to the table as a healthcare professional with clinical experience, some additional elements are necessary to launch a successful career in CME medical writing.
1. Adopt a Business Mindset as a Freelancer
Coming from a clinical background, you may be used to patients “magically” showing up without having to think about the business or logistical decisions that go into creating that outcome. However, you will need to consider this as a freelancer in medical writing.
Start by building business relationships that can lead to opportunities to work as a CME medical writer. These can be different from the relationships you have with patients and it requires some practice to cultivate business relationships in non-clinical settings. By investing time and energy into nurturing these relationships, you will set yourself up for a successful CME writing career.
2. Bring Your Professional Insights to Different Content Formats
Writers new to the CME field are often surprised by how amorphous it is. There are many different ways in which education is delivered these days, particularly online. It is now just as common to find interactive platforms and webinars for CME alongside traditional in-person seminars and workshops. As a writer in this field, you need to be prepared to work on content in a variety of formats.
Slide decks, newsletters, needs assessments, and grant proposals are some examples of different CME formats you may encounter. Familiarizing yourself with them and honing your skills to write effectively regardless of the format can give you an added edge in building your CME writing career.
3. Be Aware of Policies and Regulations
CME is a unique field in that a lot of education is funded by pharmaceutical companies that are seeking to bring products to market. As such, CME writers have an important task in providing a fair and balanced perspective in the content they create. Being aware of the policies and regulations in CME is paramount to ensure that you are able to represent science and medicine faithfully and accurately in the content you create.
The Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions has various useful resources on policies and regulations for medical writers. They also host meetings and events for CEHP writers to learn about the regulatory framework within CME.
Preparing for a Successful CME Writing Career
As a healthcare professional with clinical experience, you have a headstart on other writers seeking to get into CME. However, navigating the CEHP landscape and honing the necessary skills to become a proficient medical writer can still be tricky. Learn more about how WriteCME Pro can support your medical writing journey.
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