Who is your medical publication actually written for?

By Tara Byrne, Director of Projects and Delivery

It’s a question that sounds obvious until you sit in a room full of medical publication professionals and realise the answer is changing faster than most of the industry is ready to admit.

I’ve recently returned from three days at the ISMPP Annual Meeting in Washington DC, and while AI featured prominently (as it has at every industry gathering for the past two years) the conversation was less focused on whether AI can write and support efficiencies, and more on what it’s reading and why that matters.

Around 66% of HCPs now use AI tools in clinical decision-making. That statistic landed in discussions throughout the conference and its implications are significant. If the primary consumer of a medical publication is increasingly an algorithm rather than a clinician, than the assumptions about impact (reach, readability, journal prestige) must be reexamine.

The measurement problem

This brought measurement front and centre, and the consensus was that existing metrics are no longer fully capturing the impact of publications. Journal impact factor remains deeply embedded in how teams evaluate the success of their work, but it was designed for a different era, and the more pressing question now is one it was never built to answer. How do you measure whether your evidence is actually being discovered and used in a world where AI intermediates access to information?

Open access is one of the factors considered when thinking about discoverability. It has undoubtedly expanded visibility for medical publications, but it has also reduced control over how AI tools select, surface and synthesise that content. What once felt like a straightforward win is proving more complex in practice.

The platforms making inroads into clinical decision-making, like OpenEvidence, draw on a specific subset of the evidence base and provide physicians with the data without the physician every reading the actual paper. If your publication isn’t optimised for those tools and large language machines, visibility and engagement may be lower than you’d assume.

Measuring what actually matters

It’s a challenge we think about a great deal at Madano. As measurement becomes more strategic, less about retrospective reporting and more about informing decisions before and during a publication’s life cycle, the question of what to track, and why, becomes increasingly important.

It’s the thinking that underpins IRIS, our publication impact measurement tool. The feedback at ISMPP was encouraging with benchmarking capability, integration into planning, and metrics aligned to strategic objectives resonated strongly with the teams we spoke to. One attendee described it as “one of most effective ways of measuring impact”.