The medical communications field and its agencies
"Medical communications", or MedComms, is a label for a body of work rather than a document type, and what it covers, who does it and how wide the term is drawn are the questions it raises. Medical communications and agency roles covers deciding whether to move into it, which employers take an inexperienced writer the routes into an entry-level agency job, medical affairs writing the in-house function that commissions much of the work, responding to a request for proposal how an agency wins it, and medical advertising the promotional deliverables at one edge of it.
Expect no settled definition, and read the disagreement as the field's shape
Practitioners say openly that the boundary is unsettled. The guest editor of the June 2016 issue of EMWA's Medical Writing opened it by conceding that for many members of a medical writers' association the meaning of medical communications is a bit hazy, and built the issue out of invited specialists explaining who they are and what they do, whose articles would illustrate a few of the varied angles of a somewhat heterogeneous specialty. The authors of the same issue's article on the top ten careers questions, written after almost a decade of NetworkPharma careers events for entrants to the field, put it more bluntly: line up several MedComms specialists, ask them what MedComms is, and the answers differ widely, which is one reason their careers events prioritise sessions at which candidates meet the agencies. The issues of EMWA's Medical Writing of June 2016 (volume 25, number 2, Medical Communication), September 2016 (volume 25, number 3, Statistics), December 2016 (volume 25, number 4, Medical Education), September 2017 (volume 26, number 3, Observational Studies) and June 2018 (volume 27, number 2, Public Disclosure) were admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair, whose known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
"Medical communications" is an unspecific term. Sometimes it is used only to describe publications, medical education and public relations; sometimes it also includes regulatory writing and advertising.
The definitions on offer differ mainly in how widely they are drawn. The guest editor's is an activity list — publications, congress presentations, posters, advisory boards, satellite symposia, standalone meetings — reduced to a single writing task: producing a text that contains a few well-chosen key messages, has a specific purpose, and is for a particular audience. The guest editor likens MedComms writing to regulatory writing: like it, MedComms writing is tremendously varied in medical specialty, text and readership, yet follows certain norms and is supported by a growing number of guidelines. The careers article's definition is a purpose rather than a list: medical communications provides consultancy services to the pharmaceutical industry to help raise awareness of medicines. The American association's, quoted by the journal's web columnists , is a production definition — the development and production of materials dealing specifically with medicine or healthcare, with medical communicators writing, editing or developing them — which as they note ties the term closely to medical writing, since many people in the business are medical writers. A careers guide by one of the careers article's authors, which the columnists also quote, states an objective instead: to educate and inform stakeholders such as doctors, patients, nurses and hospital managers about innovations and perspectives in healthcare.
Two further readings set the agency view against a wider one. A freelance medical communication consultant, in an article from the archives of the journal and its predecessor, gave a narrow and agency-shaped answer to the question "so what exactly does your job involve?": med comms agencies traditionally support pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in three key areas — publication planning, including clinical publications and congress presentations developed with authors and in line with good publication practice; thought-leader educational programmes, including live advisory boards, satellite symposia and standalone meetings, with all the scientific content from slides to programme books; and the production of an extensive range of other educational materials for health professionals, such as slide kits and monographs. The editor of the journal's language column accepts that as a description of agencies and refuses it as a definition of the field. Starting from communication as the purposeful exchange of information through a shared system of signs, the column reads medical communication as any communication relating to medicine and biomedicine, which brings in medical journalism, communication to non-medical audiences including patients, caregivers and patient advocates, and the involvement of regulatory agencies. The web columnists treat health communications — promoting health information to the general public, as in a public health campaign — as a subcategory of medical communications. They also place physician-to-patient communication under the term.
EMWA's fourth symposium, held at its spring conference in Munich in 2016 under the title Scientific and Medical Communication Today, focused on the ever-changing field of medical communications and the importance of medical writers as medical communicators. A professor of science communication opened with a wide view of the evolving environment of scientific communication and the challenges it poses to the professional functions and working practices of scientific and medical writers. A training consultant then turned the focus onto the writer's own reputation, branding, brand promise and value, explaining from paradigmatic examples of brand what building a medical writer's brand involves.
The second session discussed different perspectives on what scientific communication means. A patient organisation's representative presented the patients' view — the need to see patients as the centre of any healthcare service and to communicate to them appropriately — and connected it to the EU Clinical Trials Regulation's requirement that clinical trial communications include a lay person, which means medical writers have to be able to prepare such documents and communicate scientific data to patients as well. A communications professional then gave an example of effective communication of medical data to patients and the lay public by narrating a story that emotively involved the audience, inspiring writers on the difference between writing and communicating medicine. A past president of the association closed the morning on effective translation, arguing that it cannot be ensured by applying translation standards but has to be targeted to the cultural environment.
Regulators, industry and agencies then each said what they wanted from the same work. A regulatory agency representative presented the authorities' initiatives on communication and transparency and the benefits of developing and using them effectively. An industry representative shared expectations and issues through examples of the importance of high-quality disclosures and their link to the status of drug development, and highlighted industry's appreciation of medical writers as a key figure in communicating about unmet medical and patient needs. A speaker from the medical communications agency Oxford PharmaGenesis closed the session with the medical communication agency's point of view: planning and high-quality delivery are the constants that ensure a successful collaboration.
The closing session was about where the publishing of it all is going, and the three speakers divided the horizon between them. A publisher described new technologies and methods of communicating scientific data and facilitating access to information, and their crucial role in the present and future. A second predicted how scientific articles and their management might develop over the next five, ten and twenty years, according to the evolving reading habits of healthcare professionals and technical evolution. A third spoke on extending the impact and reach of science publications, arguing for the central role of scientific journals in future high-quality research disclosure in an environment where open access to content and data extends the reach of publishing beyond traditional research communities to anyone with an interest or need. Each session ended with questions from the audience, the presentations were made available on the association's website, and some presenters were to write up their talks for a later issue of the journal.
Read what a medical communications role actually contains
An account of medical communications as a whole, rather than of one role inside it, is what someone weighing the move needs, and two accounts written for that reader give one. John Dixon gave the first at an undated webinar for doctors whose internal references place it in 2018 or 2019, and his definition of the field is professional communication services supplied to the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries to raise awareness of medicines and medical devices. The transcript is selectively corrected automatic captions. Helen Chambers, medical communications director, and Amelia Frizell-Armitage, UK head of publications, both of Costello Medical in Cambridge, wrote the second for EMWA's March 2026 careers issue, addressed to someone who imagines the field as "just" peer-reviewed manuscripts and congress abstracts. At its core, they say, it turns medical and scientific data into content that is accurate, accessible and meaningful for healthcare professionals, payers, patients and policymakers, to support informed decisions and better care, and it is varied and fast-paced — a detailed scientific abstract in the morning and a gameshow-style educational symposium for doctors in the afternoon. They set it against regulatory writing, which prepares submissions to authorities with a strong focus on compliance, traceability and authority-driven standards: medical communications spans the whole product lifecycle, reaches a broader range of stakeholders, and aims at education and engagement, prioritising impact rather than regulatory acceptance. The issues of Medical Writing — March 2026 (volume 35, number 1, on medical writing careers), June 2016 (volume 25, number 2, on medical communication) and June 2013 (volume 22, number 2) — were admitted from existing Markdown conversions without content repair; their known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
What the writing consists of runs well past manuscripts. Under medical education Dixon places manuscripts, conference material and conference slides, advisory boards — the captions render that term as something else, and the list it sits in makes it certain — and the organisation of training events and educational meetings, an overlap he notes with the later stages of regulatory writing. Alongside that sits work that is not highly technical at all and which he singles out as the part he most enjoyed: writing for lay audiences, and text for disease-awareness websites, which he calls challenging for the reason taken up under the research skills you already have. Digital communications he describes as a growing and expanding area of writing in its own right. And some of the work is not writing: developing a publication strategy, meaning what is published when and where, and designing marketing campaigns for new products or for ones being rejuvenated after some years, with public relations and health economics as further specialist areas. Publication planning and what a promotional campaign is made of carry those two.
Chambers and Frizell-Armitage list the project types in three groups. Strategy development starts from what matters to each audience, who needs to hear it and when: for a product launch the team works with stakeholders to define what makes it unique, set the communication objectives, map what each audience needs at each stage, choose the data and the format — publications, educational materials, digital content — and plan the roll-out, then executes each piece. Publications remain core — abstracts, posters and oral presentations for congresses and manuscripts for journals — with growing use of enhanced and novel formats such as plain-language publications, videos, infographics and podcasts, and they demand a detailed grasp of the disease landscape and the product and the ability to discuss and interpret comments from world-leading experts. Medical affairs work bridges a company's data and the scientific community: symposia, speaker slide decks, materials for medical science liaisons, product question-and-answer documents and internal education such as congress reports on competitors' data, and, more recently, omnichannel campaigns and personalised content tailored by engagement metrics.
Know what an agency sells and how it is run
In principle the field has edges. The careers article's authors describe MedComms agencies as having their roots in medical education and traditionally producing the more highly technical scientific materials — journal manuscripts for peer review, learning resources, slide kits, and posters and presentations for conferences — much of it by definition worked on closely with external experts, with marketing-led agencies such as branding and public relations at one end and arms-length accredited continuing medical education providers at the other. In practice those edges are often blurred, and many MedComms agencies sit inside broader communications groups that let them work beyond the edges anyway. Two things they treat as reliable where the definition is not: in MedComms the accuracy and robustness of the data is paramount, and the business is heavily dominated by postgraduate-level writers equipped to understand, interpret and communicate the science appropriately to the intended audience. They also record where the commissioning has moved — increasingly led within client companies by medical affairs teams rather than marketing teams — and a working pattern in which most individuals operate at an international level, usually commissioned by the head offices of global pharmaceutical companies.
The list of what agencies produce looks different again when someone describes the agency they worked in. A medical writer and customer relationship manager at a French agency dedicated to medical education, who later went freelance in Paris, sets out in EMWA's December 2016 issue what such an agency sells: strategic counsel and solutions to increase awareness among a pharmaceutical client's relevant targets about new drug products and their benefits and risks to patients, and ways of disseminating that information at scale through a variety of formats and media. What the agency produces are promotional documents or programmes, which are then delivered to the company's targets through its sales representative taskforce or its own medical department. The conversion of that article interleaves its columns with the boxes and the author information beside them, so the order of its fragments cannot be relied on.
Meetings and conferences are the first service area, and the deliverables are specific. A client may ask the agency to cover a conference where the latest developments in a therapeutic area are presented, so that the agency attends and produces reports synthesising the main outcome, sometimes with the help of medical experts, and presents the highlights as slides, video interviews or online newsletters for distribution and discussion at other professional meetings — which is how doctors who could not attend still get the content. The agency may organise a symposium itself, planning contents and schedules, arranging speakers and other contributors, and producing the slide kits, leaflets, posters and advertising banners that go with it. And it runs other professional meetings and programmes for physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other health professionals, which can take the form of slide shows, videos, tablet applications, websites, web conferences or live broadcasts; the agency conceives, sets up and executes these, which involves a great deal of brainstorming, copywriting of the scientific content, coordination and logistics, while the sales representatives usually take charge of setting up the meetings themselves using the materials the agency provides. Advisory board materials covers the fourth kind of meeting on the list.
Best practice surveys are the second. Such a survey assesses the general practices of physicians and compares physician and patient perceptions, on the reasoning that knowing how patients perceive things can bring interesting views and open opportunities to improve disease management and treatment; it may run nationally or be addressed to the physicians of one or more specialties. The agency's role is creating the questionnaires, generally with the help of key opinion leaders, promoting participation, and collecting and processing the data. The survey also gives the sales representatives occasions to visit medical experts and set up professional meetings.
Editing and writing is the third, and it has not been displaced by interactive media. Publication remains an inescapable channel of communication, whether product- or therapeutic-area-oriented, and brochures, literature reviews, patient booklets and information leaflets are the classical tools handed to the doctors and institutions the representatives visit; producing them involves extensive literature research, writing innovative scientific and medical content, and sometimes editing material written by medical experts. Working in an agency also does not mean leaving traditional writing tasks aside: clients regularly require manuscripts for journal publication as well as abstracts and posters for scientific meetings, and where an agency's own programmes generate important results — a national survey, a successful patient-centred programme — it falls to the agency to propose a structured, high-impact and financially acceptable plan for disseminating those data, publication included.
Creative work is a further task category, with its own competence. Advertising or project managers liaise with the studio designers, who may be external partners, about the format type — print, digital or video — and about the design and layout of the communication product; the manager needs a knowledge of the graphic design chain as well as flexibility and an interest in all types of multimedia support.
What holds a medical communications agency together over twenty years is a question the chief executive of Oxford PharmaGenesis, the speaker who had closed a session of EMWA's 2016 symposium with the agency's point of view, answers in an interview for EMWA's June 2018 issue. The company was founded in 1998 by an Oxford zoology lecturer who moved into publishing and communications, with the stated aim of creating an environment in which talented people could deliver excellent quality to clients they liked; the premises were part of that, an eighteenth-century listed barn outside Oxford that housed fourteen people when the chief executive joined, fifteen years before the interview, and had grown by 2018 into two further buildings on the same site plus offices in central Oxford, London, Cardiff, Basel and Philadelphia, with another opening in Melbourne — over 200 employees in seven offices.
The chief executive's account of why that worked puts ownership first. Independence, the account argues, is central to the company's success because it allows a long view, prioritising high-quality delivery and client service together with a commitment to social responsibility, which in turn builds lasting relationships with clients, colleagues, patients and experts. The independence was secured in 2012 when a group of employees worked with the founder on a management buy-out, with the founder remaining chairman; because all the shareholders are actively engaged in the business, the company can hold to a strategy of staying close to clients and following them into new areas. The engagement figures the interview cites are 86% of employees saying it is a great place to work and turnover below 10%. Those are one firm's self-reported figures rather than a benchmark.
Know how an agency is organised and how it wins work
An agency copywriter works inside an organisation whose shape decides how much of the copy is the writer's own decision, and Carsol's account is a usable map of it. An agency is a strategic communication partner to a pharmaceutical company, providing advertising, promotion and strategic guidance aimed at healthcare professionals and patients — or, in the second definition he quotes, consultancy services helping raise awareness of medicines through education and promotion. Beyond traditional advertising the services can include medical education, events, public relations, market research and digital communications, and by the time he wrote most agencies had put digital channels at the heart of the offering with a multichannel approach across web, mobile, tablet, video and digital television, which means the copywriter has to work across all of those formats. Dixon's list of what the larger agencies offer runs from medical education through regulatory affairs, branding and advertising and healthcare public relations to, increasingly at the time he spoke, health economics.
Two distinctions decide what a given brief actually is. The first is breadth, and all three accounts draw it. Dixon's own agency had three medical writers among about fourteen employees, and the range runs up to global groups with hundreds of employees, many writers, and offices in the major capitals; size decides the service mix, since smaller companies tend to offer specialist or niche services while the larger ones offer the full range. Carsol draws the same line between agencies focused on particular services such as public relations and medical education and those offering the full range, some part of a global group and others small and independent, and Chambers and Frizell-Armitage add that some teams focus on a single disease area while others span many, and that some organisations run formal career-development tracks where others offer blended roles across areas. The second is the client: an agency partnering a pharmaceutical company on an international account is a global agency, responsible for the global communication, and all of that communication is in English; an agency working with a local subsidiary is a local agency, which follows the global communications strategy and owns only the national campaign. Knowing which of the two you are writing for tells you whether the strategy is yours to shape or yours to implement.
Why the client uses an agency at all shapes what they will accept. Carsol's list is capacity that supplements internal resources for a short period, or skills that would not be used often enough to justify developing them in house; and, on the qualitative side, an objective viewpoint, because an agency is free of the client's internal politics, is often more creative at generating ideas, and can bring something fresh to the project.
The roles around the writer are worth learning by what each is accountable for. In Carsol's account a Client Service Director handles coordination of delivery timelines and overall financial management, negotiates with clients and looks for new business. An Account Manager runs individual budgets and the timely delivery of specific projects, prepares cost estimates, coordinates agency activity and liaises with internal team members and external suppliers. A Medical Director leads the medical writing team with medical, scientific and regulatory oversight, can extend into strategic support for the client, takes part in new-business pitches and consults frequently with global key opinion leaders and community healthcare professionals. Creative Executives are responsible for the creative work produced for accounts, with the Art Director leading all creative elements — and the copywriter sits with them as part of the creative team rather than with the medical or account functions. Chambers and Frizell-Armitage describe the roles around the medical writers, who draft, generate ideas for presenting the data and the story, implement authors' and clients' comments and work with design teams: editorial roles responsible for quality control, fact-checking and getting materials through approval platforms, and account managers who run budgets, timelines, client liaison and business development.
Winning the work is a project of its own that the copywriter is inside. Agencies pitch competitively for a client's business, ideally against a concise but thorough brief, and the request can be for a strategic proposal alone, for creative concepts alone, or for both — the fullest form asking the agencies to understand the market, identify the target group, plan a media strategy, generate ideas and produce a finished creative presentation. From the client's side the object is to select the proposal that will add the most value to the brand. Carsol calls participating in a pitch one of the most thrilling and sometimes uncomfortable experiences of the job, notes that it is how agencies win most of their business, and locates the thrill in the preparation and the presentation, both of which the copywriter takes part in.
Place the work inside the marketing mix, where much of it is indirect promotion
Because medical communications is the interface between clinical research and promotion, the guest editor holds that the need to understand marketing and communication is paramount. The account of why starts from what marketing means for each kind of client: for an academic group it can mean communicating their research, raising the profile of the research group, or building international renown; for a pharmaceutical company it means making sure that doctors and other health professionals have access to and know about the medicines and devices it has developed. Pharmaceutical marketing is then a mix of pricing and reimbursement, packaging, and place — where the product is best sold, which is not always a pharmacy against a prescription but sometimes a hospital, a specialised clinic or even a supermarket. Communication is one part of that mix: the specific activities by which a company talks to its clients and stakeholders about a disease area, a service or a product, sometimes developed in-house and more often with an agency or a medical communications consultant, and chosen according to the communication objectives and to the needs of the end user or prescriber.
The list of activities has grown in one direction. Classical medical research communication activities are publications, posters and international symposia; the industry has added sponsored satellite symposia, advisory boards and standalone meetings, which let opinion leaders, researchers and sponsors discuss, give experts a forum in which to share ideas and build guidelines and recommendations, foster continued research and share experience. A medical communications writer is involved across all of it — planning the event, writing or checking slides, producing brochures, and producing publications out of the meetings. The guest editor attaches one instruction about who writes what: native English writers can and should work closely with non-native speakers so that their voice is heard and their knowledge does not get lost in translation, which supporting authors who write in English as an additional language covers in detail.
Medical education as an agency service is, in the December 2016 account, an indirect communication strategy. Covering conferences, developing professional programmes, running surveys and publishing books or brochures from medical information all provide ways of strengthening a pharmaceutical company's presence in a therapeutic area, and they count as an indirect communication strategy for as long as no specific product is mentioned: the focus is the product's therapeutic area instead. The target audiences are doctors, nurses and other health professionals, and were opening to patients and the general public.
The move towards it was produced by regulation and by market conditions together. Drug promotion legislation in France and other EU countries had become stricter, making direct promotion harder; and patent expiry legislation, governmental pressure on physicians to reduce prescribing, lower reimbursement prices and a slower development pipeline had brought a steady decrease in the medical sales representative workforce, which the account quantifies with figures for France in 2007 and 2011 — 21,900 and 17,500 representatives, the sentence carrying them being garbled in conversion so that only the direction of travel and the two counts are recoverable. A health scandal in 2010 involving a weight-loss drug reinforced suspicions about the role and led the government to regulate representatives' activities further. The French regulatory developments the account lists, it argues, compel most pharmaceutical companies to realign their communication strategy away from traditional sales activities, and agencies strengthened their medical education offering to meet that need. Codes of practice on promotion and interactions with health professionals carries the French instruments themselves.
The advantages the account lists for the indirect route are partly scientific and partly procedural. It is a powerful way of attracting the interest of medical experts and developing partnerships with them, since the experts broaden their own knowledge of a disease or therapeutic area, and it creates room to promote patient-centred initiatives. Because therapeutic classes rather than brand names appear in the documents, no prior approval from the French medicines agency is needed, which makes the regulatory procedure quicker, simpler and more efficient and makes the timelines achievable. And indirect communication can run across the entire drug lifecycle, from clinical research to marketing approval, whereas direct promotion is not permitted before launch, so a company can assert its presence in a therapeutic area at any phase: pre-launch, launch, early and late commercialisation, and marketing authorisation extension.
What changes for the writer is the subject matter rather than the craft. The formats, media and services stay the same; what widens is the range of topics, because instead of a drug's efficacy, risk–benefit ratio and mechanism of action, the programme can address the whole context of the therapeutic area — medical economics, molecular biology, the organisation of healthcare — and patient-centred programmes on the impact of secondary disease-related effects, psychological issues such as depression at work, care support practices, or the patient's wellbeing at each treatment stage.