High-quality tailored medical information can allow patients to become more aware and responsible for their health, and to respond better and more quickly to their health problems. With right knowledge, patients can feel more in control and effectively participate in the decision-making concerning their healthcare and life. Health professionals must exert continuous efforts to ensure that patients have access to high-quality and evidence-based information resources. However, inadequate information may increase patients’ distress, anxiety, and dissatisfaction, which may negatively affect their decision-making ability and quality of life. Below are a few case studies describing the quality of health information provided to patients. A professional medical writer is someone who has an adequate understanding of medical, scientific and health terms and concepts, and the skills to translate such information into a variety of formats for different audiences. Medical writers come from various backgrounds and can find work in a variety of fields.

So medical writing as a professional service has served the medical profession for over half a century as a means of providing editorial input, making sure documents are compliant with journal or regulatory formats, and taking data and changing it into text or figures for the authors to refine. This has been a successful model and for many this continues to be what a medical writer offers. This is the world of standard medical writing: putting data on paper with little input regarding the most effective order or format of presentation, because of the belief that data speak for themselves. It is the foundation of what medical writing has to offer. The grammar is generally good, the right font styles are applied, and the documents are compliant with formats dictated by the applicable guidelines. In general, standard medical writers are happy to sit in the back seat of the writing process, waiting for the authors to tell them what should be done next with the storyline. Which means, the documents will have all the necessary basic elements, they will communicate within the realm of what the authors are able to conceive of on their own, and they will get done when the authors find the time to coordinate each stage of review within their busy schedules.

Yet, medical writing can be so much more. It can take the communication of the data from a data dump to something that tells a story, clearly and quickly. Good medical writers understand that – contrary to the old adage – data do not speak for themselves. Authors need to interpret data and decide what they mean. Through discussions with the authors, medical writers can help tease out all different parts of the story a data set may have to tell, and weave them together in such a way that they build upon each other. As a result, the reader is not only able to follow the flow of thought and naturally understand the messages, they also see how the authors arrived at the conclusions. This is effective communication, arising out of the team work between authors and a medical writer, and it is the product of strategic medical writing.