What are the content reuse practices in the healthcare and medical device industries with DITA?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

In the healthcare and medical device industries, leveraging DITA XML for content reuse is essential for maintaining accurate, consistent, and compliant documentation. These sectors often deal with highly regulated content, and DITA practices contribute to the quality and efficiency of documentation.

Reuse of Medical Procedures

One common practice in healthcare is the reuse of medical procedures. Hospitals, clinics, and healthcare organizations create DITA topics for various medical procedures. These topics can then be referenced or included in different documents. For instance, a surgical procedure topic may be referenced in a patient’s pre-operative instructions, post-operative care guidelines, and surgical staff training materials. If the procedure is updated or improved, changes are automatically reflected across all documents, reducing the risk of inconsistencies and errors.

Standard Operating Procedures for Medical Devices

In the medical device industry, DITA is utilized to maintain consistency in standard operating procedures (SOPs). These SOPs can be authored as DITA topics and included in user manuals, training materials, and regulatory documentation. When a medical device manufacturer needs to update safety instructions or usage guidelines for a device, the changes are made once in the source DITA topic, ensuring uniformity in all documents where the SOP is used.

Example:

Here’s an example illustrating the reuse of a medical procedure in DITA:


<topic id="surgical_procedure">
  <title>Surgical Procedure</title>
  <body>
    <p>This DITA topic outlines a surgical procedure for a specific medical condition.</p>
    <p>For pre-operative instructions, refer to <xref href="pre_op_instructions.dita" />.

    <p>For post-operative care, see <xref href="post_op_care.dita" />.

    <p>This procedure is part of the training manual available in <xref href="surgical_training.dita" />.

  </body>

With this approach, the surgical procedure content remains consistent and can be efficiently updated while ensuring the highest standards of patient care.