A Brief Introduction to Technical Communication in Healthcare

by Debbie Davy, Quill Contributor

Synopsis of Today's Healthcare industry

Today's Healthcare organizations are increasingly leveraging information technology to support data-driven clinical care and increasing their investment in Information Technology (IT) for efficient service delivery.

This is good news for technical communicators, as more opportunities emerge that require our unique skill sets. The following is a brief, high-level synopsis of the main needs of today's Healthcare industry, and how technical communicators can help:

• Quality reporting: Healthcare organizations are focusing on quality reporting to deliver better quality services. To ensure quality, more process-related staff training is required (e.g., Six Sigma), as well as business tools that help organizations integrate existing information systems to capture, store, retrieve, and report quality information. Opportunities exist for technical communicators to design training materials and assist in the development of these new tools.
• Technology implementation: Because applications are more complex, it takes Healthcare organizations more time to implement them. As a result, long-term contracts are becoming the standard for technical communicators.
• Electronic health records: An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a health record of an individual that is accessible online from many separate, interoperable automated systems within an electronic network. 

Through Infoway Inc., an independent, not-for-profit corporation, the development and implementation of effective, interoperable Electronic Health Record solution in Canada is an immediate priority. Infoway is working with the private sector to help better leverage its investment dollars, and better align their IT industry's business directions with its goals.

According to the Infoway Web site, their $1.1 billion investment is straining the IT industry's current capacity and capability, and it is anticipated that there will be an additional 1,500 to 2,000 technology, health informatics, and change management personnel required by 2010. Technical communication skills will certainly be in demand for this initiative.

• Using the Web: Increasingly, Healthcare organizations are turning to the Web to deliver information and empower patients. Partly in response to patients' desires to be more involved in their care, Web portals are being developed that enable users to perform administrative functions (enrollment, eligibility, registration, claims, etc.) to improve efficiency and lower costs. Technical communicators can help facilitate the development of these Web portals and administrative systems, as well as develope useful Web sites that patients can access for more information.

Opportunities for Technical Communicators

The Healthcare field offers many opportunities for technical writers. Most often, technical communicators work in one of these system fields: pharmaceutical and biotechnology, medical informatics, and laboratory information.

Here are some general examples of the work that technical communicators produce for these industries:

• Pharmaceutical and biotechnology - Technical communicators produce regulatory documents, clinical study protocols, investigative drug procedures, and white papers.
• Medical informatics - Technical communicators write user manuals and IT system documentation. For example, they help develop and define information process flows, conceptual architecture, and user interfaces.
• Laboratory systems - Technical communicators write (or edit) research papers and patient information handbooks. They help develop information architecture, write user manuals, and perform structured writing tasks to support electronic or on-line systems.

Technical communicators can also produce articles and develop Healthcare-related marketing materials for magazines, newspapers, and the Web.

Requires an Enhanced Perspective

Technical writing for Healthcare requires an enhanced perspective over technical writing for other fields. Although certainly not exclusive to technical communication for Healthcare, the following elements are very important:

• Technical expertise - It is helpful to have an educational background or the equivalent in-depth knowledge of a medical or scientific discipline to better understand medical and scientific terminology and measurement. This is also helpful when extracting information from subject matter experts for communication initiatives.
• Attention to detail - While most technical communicators do focus on details, in Healthcare, details are impactful. Minor errors in sentence structure or document composition could impact meaning and be detrimental to patient health, so greater care must be taken when writing. Additional layers of editing are standard practice.
• Ethics and balanced writing - Care must be taken when structuring and developing Healthcare information so that the distinction between objective information, advertising, and/or promotional content is clear, and business ties are disclosed.
• Regulatory focus - Often, Healthcare writing deals with documents that offer prescribed information to meet regulatory requirements. For example, to market a medical device in the United States, device manufacturers submit an application known as a 510(k) to notify the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in advance, of their intent to market a medical device. In Canada, an application is made to the Therapeutic Products Directorate (TPD) — the TPD applies the Food and Drug Regulations and the Medical Devices Regulations to ensure that the pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices offered for sale in Canada are safe, effective, and of high quality.
• Understanding of specialized terminology - Healthcare industry jargon is often Latin-based, and it helps to have knowledge of the spelling of the common terms and an understanding of their Latin roots.

My Personal Experience

To provide a unique, personal perspective to the trends discussed in this article, the following describes my progression through different technical communication roles in the Healthcare field:

• Medical Informatics: My first exposure to Healthcare-specific technical communication was in 1998 at a Toronto software engineering firm that provides applications and IT services in the medical informatics field. I helped them develop user manuals for a medical laboratory operation and management software product line, a large-scale population-based Healthcare program, and a centralized provincial medical record system.

  I was fortunate to have as my mentor a man who was both a medical doctor and a medical informatics pioneer. One of the most important and humbling lessons he taught me was to abandon any marketing hubris in documentation. Because my prior writing experience had involved marketing writing as well as scientific writing, with a somewhat greater emphasis on marketing writing, I had developed bad habits.

• Neurodiagnostic Devices: At a manufacturer of neuromuscular and neurophysiological instruments (EEG, EMG, ECG), I learned to write user manuals by hands-on experimentation with the instruments. Using the lessons learned from my first Healthcare assignments, and tinkering with the actual device, I learned how to structure manuals to reduce the volume of calls to technical support staff, and give users the information they needed in an easily-accessible format.

  This company enabled me to gain experience in another very important part of Healthcare technical communication — writing documentation for regulatory bodies. I wrote applications to obtain approvals and pre-market certifications for medical device products. Additionally, I wrote documentation that helped the company maintain its International Standards Organization (ISO) status and the technical portion of research and development tax credit claims (SR&ED) claims.

• Laboratory Information System: Currently, I am working as part of the delivery team on an integrated, province-wide system for the electronic exchange of laboratory information between practitioners, laboratories, and the provincial government's health ministry. I write documentation that describes proprietary IT infrastructure, and I help manage the documentation set.
  
  

About Debbie Davy

Debbie has written documentation for neuromuscular medical devices and medical informatics applications, and is currently working at Capgemini Canada Ltd. documenting an Ontario Laboratories Information System.