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ISMPP US 2025 Highlights
Written by Noud Van Helmond on Tuesday, June 17, 2025
From May 12 to 14, 2025, ISMPP welcomed over 700 attendees to its 21st Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. OPEN Health sent a large team to the meeting, comprising 14 executive leaders, business development specialists, creative leaders, and medical and market access directors, to learn, share, and connect with others in the pharmaceutical and medical publication industries.
With a meeting theme of “Diversity and Innovation: In Concert”, this year’s ISMPP meeting challenged attendees to embrace diverse perspectives in thought, experience, background, or discipline as a catalyst for innovation. These two central themes echoed through a range of keynote presentations, plenary talks, member-led roundtable sessions, and 72 poster presentations.
OPEN Health’s key take-home messages from the meeting included:
- Considering a diverse audience expands the reach and impact of medical communications
- Keynote speaker Lisa Fitzpatrick shared practical strategies to improve health literacy, build trust, and tailor communication to diverse audiences, drawing from her conversations as “Dr. Lisa on the Street” talking about health issues in the community
- In a pre-meeting workshop titled “Enhancing visual communication: Creating impact and inclusivity in Medical publications and communications”, Justin Sodano, Head of US Creative Services at OPEN Health, explored how effective data visualization and visual communication can help bridge the gap between complex data and audience understanding. Through real-world case studies, practical exercises, and collaborative discussions, attendees gained a comprehensive understanding of how to design and implement visuals tailored to an array of audiences. The session also addressed emerging trends in visual communication, data visualization, and the integration of accessibility standards to ensure universal and comprehensive medical communications
- Partnering with patients in publications is critical to ensuring relevance to and accessibility for this audience, with the ultimate goal of increasing health literacy and improving outcomes
- Several sessions addressed keyways to engage patients, including as publication authors (eg, plain language summaries [PLSs] or PLS publications [PLSPs]) or reviewers, members of steering committees for insight generation, participants in symposia, and reviewers during clinical trial protocol development, among other roles
- Challenges to effective patient engagement include language barriers, time and resourcing constraints (onboarding, review time, payment), one-sided/short-term engagement, and patient/advocate identification
- Resources to assist in effective patient engagement were also discussed, including the newly released guidance from the ISMPP Patient Engagement Task Force
- AI is increasingly being used and is becoming more efficient, while some practical barriers remain
- Although this meeting revealed tremendous enthusiasm for possible GenAI/AI applications in our industry, it also highlighted some ongoing challenges in their implementation
- Plenary sessions addressed uncertainty about the copyright of GenAI-created content, with ownership varying by country and depending on the level of human intervention, creative input, and platform-specific terms; similarly, there are constraints on the use of copyrighted material to train AI models
- Time savings from the use of GenAI can be limited if extensive manual prompting is needed to generate useable output; prompt engineering or the use of AI to create prompts can help reduce time spent prompting
- Industry and agency members of the ISMPP Artificial Intelligence Task Force presented strategies to maintain quality standards in AI-generated content, such as establishing best practices for implementation, collaborative innovation labs and training, and maintaining feedback loops
- Karen King, Lucy Carrier, and Hannah Bassirat of OPEN Health led a roundtable discussion, “A Debut Concert of ‘Accelerando Publications’, by The Innovation Symphony Orchestra,” which explored, among other things, how AI might be best used to increase the speed of the publication process
- In the poster session, Karen King, Executive Vice President Medical & Scientific Services at OPEN Health, presented on “A pilot study evaluating the performance of a custom-build large language model-based App that uses reporting guidelines items to generate manuscript abstracts,” which found that an OPEN Health-owned app can generate correctly structured and largely accurate abstracts
- Measuring the impact of medical communications is critical to providing insights into successful launch strategies
- Through analysis of two products that achieved launch excellence (pembrolizumab in non-small cell lung cancer and dupilumab in asthma), a plenary session demonstrated how medical affairs analytics can be leveraged to identify trends and best practices in scientific communications strategy
- Best practices supporting a successful launch include a differentiated and evidence-based scientific narrative with a strong share of scientific voice in key scientific themes, identification of key conferences and journals to reach target audiences, and partnerships with KOLs in scientific theme areas
- Although today’s technology allows for the identification and assessment of prior medical affairs activity, in the future, predictive modeling may be able to guide evidence generation strategy
ISMPP continues to challenge its members to consider how to better reach, engage, and learn from different audiences through effective communications while also providing guidance on the ongoing implementation of AI-assisted applications. We at OPEN Health look forward to continuing this conversation – with ISMPP, with our internal team members, and with you.
At OPEN Health, we connect visionary minds, pioneering science, and advanced technology to drive real impact. By uniting people, science, and technology, we activate new opportunities for biopharma innovation. Our expertise across medical affairs and market access unlocks faster, smarter routes to market. We are committed to improving patient outcomes worldwide.
OPEN Health. The right combination to unlock possibilities.
For information about OPEN Health’s services and how we could support you, please get in touch.