One core curriculum, dozens of markets

A global pharmaceutical company ran managed patient-support programs for people on insulin therapy for type 2 diabetes, offered across dozens of international markets. Each country had built its own version, so the programs varied in depth, clinical accuracy, and tone, with out-of-date material still in active circulation. The company wanted a single core curriculum that every market could deploy, with supplemental materials acculturated to fit regional markets.

A digital health content team was engaged through the technology vendor building the web application that would house the unified program. The team was responsible for the shared core curriculum and for the first regional supplement, built for a launch market in Europe.

A colleague audited five countries’ existing materials, mapped what each program covered, and built the first framework, including which topics belonged in the universal core and which were regional supplemental content. That work set the structure. The project then transitioned to me, and I was responsible for the evidence base, content development, and regulatory review from that point forward.

Every piece of content had to rest on evidence that held up regardless of where the program launched, so I built that base first and called it the source of science. Rather than any single country’s health authority, it drew from internationally recognized bodies: global diabetes federations, multinational clinical research, and cross-border public health guidance. Each recommendation was linked to its supporting evidence, a traceable chain from the literature to the patient-facing content, and it stayed a living document, revised and expanded as review feedback and scope changes came in.

It also did regulatory work. When a reviewer questioned a claim, I could point to the evidence behind it, which moved the conversation from whether something could be said to what supported it, and reduced the number of rounds needed to reach approval.

This client’s review process also worked differently from the norm. On other pharmaceutical programs, a librarian entered new reference material into the Veeva Vault library on my behalf; here, the team had to search the company’s existing Veeva library and upload new sources into it for review and approval directly. About 90% of the sources this program relied on were not already in the library and had to be uploaded as fresh material, so the work covered not only the deliverables sent for review but the reference library the review itself depended on.

Insulin therapy has universal concepts, blood glucose monitoring, injection technique, hypoglycemia management, but the specifics vary by market: different measurement units, different standard practices, different dietary norms, and different care structures that shape how patients reach their teams. Content built too closely to one country would have to be rewritten for the next. The answer was to separate the two layers.

The review itself was complicated by geography. The medical-legal-regulatory board, the client contacts, and the first launch market all sat in different regions, so every cycle carried time-zone gaps, communication chains that passed through several stakeholders, and different expectations about acceptable content, which stretched feedback into weeks.

Front-loading the evidence was the counter. With a cited source of science in place before any patient-facing content was drafted, each review started from a citation and a rationale rather than a question. It did not remove the friction of cross-region review, but it reduced the rounds and kept the conversation on the content.

The core framework was completed and approved through review. The module structure and the finished module content went to the technology vendor for integration into the platform, and the first European supplement was completed. The source of science and the content development forms behind them stayed internal, the tools I build to produce the content rather than deliverables a client receives. The company came away with a repeatable process: each new market adopts the core and develops its own supplement using the same method. The platform and the broader rollout are ongoing, and the technology vendor continued the build after my engagement ended.

The evidence base is not a strategy layer added later; it is the foundation of content development, and it has to exist before the content does. The rigor that documentation required was underestimated at the outset, and much of my work was making the case that evidence sourcing is not a phase you can compress.