Medical error, which leads to patient discomfort, extended hospital stays, and sometimes death is often caused by problems in the design of the medical system and/or procedure.  These design errors may lead to an incorrect action by medical personnel actively involved in patient treatment. For example a display may be overcrowded or too small. There may be too many like-sounding alarms of varying importance going off at once, so that the most important ones are missed. It may be very easy to set some equipment to administer medicine too quickly or too slowly. It may be possible to connect different types of tubing together which should not be connected to each other.  All of these errors should be prevented by better design. This prevention requires knowledge of human capabilities and limitations by the people designing and producing the medical equipment and procedures.

The technical or medical writer on a product, process or solution development team, who knows about human capabilities and limitations can predict the errors which are likely to happen in the course of their job. The writer has less ego-involvement in the product design than the engineers. With some training they might also have more knowledge about human capability and limitation. Thus, they have the potential to become a critical team member who detects potential medical errors while reviewing designs and prototypes of products and procedures and suggests alternative designs that will ultimately save patient lives. Additionally, by making the equipment safer they may prevent costly recalls and law suits.

In this session we will perform a series of activities involving attending to details, communicating, conforming, responding, and transferring learning from one environment to another. These activities show what people can do very well and where they are prone to sub-optimal performance. We will discuss some potential implications of these human strengths and weaknesses for the design of medical equipment and procedures so that the technical writer will become more equipped to help make their products safer, faster, and easier to use. In addition, the activities will illustrate some principles which may help to improve the design of documentation. 

This session is a great way to conclude your formal conference participation because it is informative, interactive, fun, and a great initial step towards learning about preventing medical error and saving lives. You might even win a prize and learn a few parenting skills, too!!!

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides a framework for any industry to develop their documentation. The idea of DITA is not only a technology that provides flexibility and cost savings, but a methodology to provide better user focused content. This workshop is to provide a brief overview of DITA and its benefits, as well as in depth, hands-on exercises working through the development of sample content. The workshop will end with a demonstration of how to display output using the DITA Open Toolkit.

Agenda

• 8:30 - 9:00 - Introductions and Goals - We will take some time in the beginning to understand each person’s goals for the workshop. This includes what projects they are working on, and what they hope to accomplish using DITA.
• 9:00 - 9:30 - Overview of DITA concepts and benefits - Before diving in to the DITA hands on experience, it helps to understand what DITA is. In this brief presentation, I will discuss concepts about topics, DITA maps and relationship tables, conditional processing, and production. We will also discuss the benefits that you can bring back to your management to encourage the change to use DITA.
• 9:30 - 11:30 - Authoring topics and creating a map - Let’s get the hands dirty. I will provide three sample topics in hard copy that you must author in DITA. Each topic will represent a different information type (task, concept, and reference) to get a full idea of what each looks like. For this exercise, you will need a computer and, on the computer, an XML editor. You can download trial versions of XML editors from the internet. The ones that would work best for this are Arbortext Editor, XMetaL, or oXygen. We will also learn how to create a DITA map to produce a hierarchical representation of your topics. We will follow a path through creation of a DITA content authoring the task first, then the concept, then the reference, and finally the DITA map.
• 11:30 - 12:00 - Demonstration of producing content through the DITA Open Toolkit - So how do you actually get to see what it looks like? I will do a short demonstration of the DITA Open toolkit using the example content provided for the previous exercises. This will not be a hands on part of the workshop due to different computer configurations.

Documentation deliverables have evolved beyond manuals and online help in recent years, and with the emergence of Web 2.0, things are changing faster than ever. Technical communicators have many more options to enhance the user experience, and developing many of them provide the opportunity to work with other departments to find a more holistic approach to content development and delivery. But there is no one-size-fits-all set of solutions. This workshop will review the types of analysis you need to do to determine which deliverables are right for your project, your customer, and your company.

Other factors that can’t be ignored, such as translation needs, staff/time constraints, file size limitations, corporate image and control, and proprietary concerns will also be discussed, including:

Analyzing the Product

• Intended audience; delivery method (desktop, web application, etc.); competitor offerings; software development methodology. The UI as part of the Help system. Product Management expectations.

• Preferences and expectations for information; work environment; knowledge and experience levels.

• Working with Training, Support, and Marketing to reduce duplication and provide the user with consistent, useful information.
• Finding ways to incorporate information from other departments to improve documentation.

• What is the optimum mix for the product?
• The traditional: online help, manuals, embedded help, job aids, forums, web sites, technical support knowledgebases.
• Emerging trends: wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, software demonstrations, podcasts, and other collaborative tools. They can supplement and/or enhance the traditional. Or, they may be a better fit for internal knowledge management or marketing use.

• Single-sourcing; best practices for structuring information; continuous publishing

This workshop is for anyone who would like to improve the quality of corporate information, and/or reduce localization costs and time-to-market. The presenter will demonstrate how a formal focus on quality drives down costs (especially translation costs) and time-to-market. That’s right: cost, quality, timeliness—you can finally have all three! Attendees will learn how investments in Information Quality Management produce cost and time reductions of 10% - 25% or more.

With a vocabulary of over 900,000 English words, we can express anything in many different ways—ranging from easy to understand and translate, to extremely difficult, to incomprehensible. And (surprise!), content that is difficult for a native English-speaker to understand, is even more difficult for a non-native speaker to understand, or to translate. Even if your content is still in “English only”, this workshop will give you insights, and introduce you to tools that will help you to communicate more effectively to diverse audiences.

We will start with an IQ self-assessment that asks the following questions:

1. Do you have Information Quality Standards?
2. Do you monitor, measure, and track conformance to these Standards?
3. Do you provide actionable, real-time feedback to Writers and Editors?
4. Do you collect Quality metrics consistently and objectively?
5. Are Information Quality metrics collected on every information product you deliver?
6. Are your metrics presented in a meaningful, actionable manner?
7. Can you conclusively demonstrate Quality improvements?
8. Can you tie time and cost reductions directly to Information Quality improvements>
9. Is your CFO happy with current translation/localization costs?

You get 20 points for each question you can answer with an honest “"Yes".” If your IQ score is 160+, your company is an early adopter of Natural Language Processing technology, and you can go to one of the other workshops.

If your score is 140 or lower, you might want to stop in to learn what the early adopters know, and how you can apply that knowledge to help improve your company’s IQ.  Specifically, you will learn about: 
•

• Proven, Quality Management principles that have been successfully applied across many manufacturing, engineering, and software development processes (6-Sigma, ISO 9000, Kaisen)
  
  • The application of these principles to the content supply chain
• Information Quality Standards and Metrics
• Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and how it is applied to analyze content for
  
  • Correct spelling, grammar, and terminology usage
  • Conformance to Corporate and/or Industry Information Standards
  • Reuse opportunities at the phrase- and sentence-level
• Tools that enable
  
  • QA—real-time feedback in native authoring, editing, and localization environments
  • QC—automatic, independent generation and tracking of meaningful, objective Information Quality metrics and reports

NOTE: attendees are encouraged to bring electronic copies of real documents (.txt, .htm/.html, .xml, .doc, .docx, .fm.) for real-time demonstrations of tool capabilities. 

The session will also include discussion of real-world applications of these tools and processes, and the resulting impact on quality, translatability, and overall cost and time-to-market.

Life Sciences companies are not alone in their need to carefully consider linguistic and cultural issues as part of their global strategy, but the highly regulated nature of the industry does result in some unique aspects of the problem. In particular, these issues run the gamut of the product life cycle from product development, through clinical trials to eventual product release and marketing. Since these various activities are distributed among functional units in the typical life sciences company, the outside “language services provider” (LSP) sometimes has a better grasp on the “big picture” than any of the buy-side participants. Even in cases where there is centralized procurement of language services, the different linguistic requirements pertaining to different phases of the product life cycle may not be fully appreciated. 

This workshop will cover a multitude of frequently asked questions designed to help you use the vendor selection process to meet the variety of linguistic needs through the product life cycle and will include viewpoints of both the buyer and seller, with time included for participant Q&A. We will present a framework for understanding the scope of the vendor selection process, identifying opportunities to formalize or improve existing processes, and for leveraging technology at various stages of the product life-cycle. We will also suggest approaches to getting the most value from your LSP partner(s).

FDA requirements for product labeling have changed radically in recent years. According to the FDA, this trend will continue in an effort to improve application processes and provide better information to health care providers and consumers.

While meeting these new FDA requirements can be challenging from a business process and technical perspective, successful roadmaps have been established that provide organizations with the ability to choose an approach that is right for their needs. The goal of this workshop is to provide attendees with the information needed to start preparing for, and ultimately successfully implementing, an effective SPL strategy.

Topics will include:

• The current status of the FDA requirements for Structured Product Labeling, and what to expect in the next 12 months
• Understanding the technical requirements of Structured Product Labeling
• SPL and your business processes: what to expect and how to prepare
• Options for implementing Structured Product Labeling in your organization

Adobe Acrobat is a multi-faceted tool for collaboration, control, and publishing. Adobe Acrobat is particularly valuable in life sciences applications in which audit trails and legal compliance are critical.

During this interactive workshop, we will investigate the capabilities of Acrobat for combining multiple documents, for controlling, restricting, and approving documents, and for supporting collaboration during the document development process.

If you aren’t currently using Adobe Acrobat Professional, this workshop will show you several capabilities that may be of high value. If you are using Adobe Acrobat Professional, this workshop may expose features or tips that you weren’t aware of.

Students should bring a laptop computer with the trial version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional installed. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is available from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html