What 2025 Taught Us About CME Writing—and What It Demands of Medical Writers in 2026
Things Fall Apart. Will CME Hold?
If you've been working as a continuing medical education (CME) medical writer or trying to break into CME writing, you probably felt the ground shifting beneath you in 2025.
The artificial intelligence (AI) wave crested, with position statements from both the Alliance in Continuing Education in the Health Professions and the Accreditation Council in Continuing Medical Education. The onward march of private equity ownership in CME compressed timelines while squeezing content budgets. And demand continues for education that is relevant at the point of care, grounded in clinical context, and designed for behavior change and measurable outcomes.
Yet pressures in 2025 intensified in ways that have changed not only what’s required of CME, but also of medical writers in the field. In particular, access to quality evidence has suffered and the scientific and clinical literature—the bedrock of CME content—has grown harder to source and to trust.
Thousands of National Institutes of Health grants have been terminated, with ripple effects that touch CME directly: fewer new studies means less evidence to translate into education.
Several major federal research and data resources, like national health surveys and dashboards, were taken offline or heavily altered in 2025, with disproportionate impact on health, climate, and DEI-related content.
The CDC removed or altered over 3,000 web pages, including datasets on chronic disease, sexually transmitted infections, overdose prevention, and reproductive care.
More than 20 NIH data repositories began displaying notices that they were ‘under review,’ restricting access to data on cancer, brain imaging, aging, and COVID-19.
Pages on vaccines, veterans’ health, and hate-crime health indicators vanished from federal portals.
What This Means for CME Writers
These pressures aren't abstract.
They show up in your project briefs, your client conversations, and your shrinking timelines. And they're reshaping what it means to succeed in this field. We are increasingly navigating an environment where the evidence base itself is subject to political pressure, requiring even more careful judgment about source credibility. For CME writers tasked with translating evidence into education, the question is no longer only which sources to trust—it's whether the sources will still exist when you need them.
The value of CME writing is shifting and the question heading into 2026 isn't whether you can write needs assessments or apply learning science principles to your content. It's about positioning yourself differently within the field: less as an order-taker executing tasks, more as a strategic partner shaping educational outcomes.
In practice, this means CME writers will increasingly be asked to create content that contextualizes uncertainty, surfaces the practical implications of new data, evidence, and standards of care, and helps clinicians reason through risk when the literature offers no clean answers.
Your judgment in weighing, framing, and sequencing evidence isn't a nice-to-have. It's becoming a core professional competency.
The Identity Shift: From Freelancer to Strategic Partner
We see this competency shift in WriteCME Pro.
When I reviewed coaching conversations in our community from the past year, one pattern emerged more consistently than any other: identity shift. We weren't just talking about how to write CME content. We were talking about how to think, decide, and position ourselves in a field evolving faster than its job descriptions.
The shift showed up in the questions WriteCME Pro members are asking.
Not just "How do I execute this task?" but "What's the rationale behind it?" Not just "What's the deliverable?" but "How should we frame the learning gap and measure outcomes?"
Writers are bringing more intention to their work and expecting to be treated as partners in educational strategy, not just as content executors.
Community Spotlight
Take Addie. A year ago, she was a freelance medical writer taking projects as they came, without a clear sense of how CME fit her long-term direction. She wanted to reposition but worried about overreaching—or destabilizing what was already working.
What shifted wasn't her skill set. It was her frame. After completing WriteCME Accelerator, Addie stopped thinking of herself as a freelancer who takes on writing projects and started operating as a business owner pursuing strategic work. The distinction sounds semantic, but it changed everything: which clients she pursued, how she scoped projects, what she felt confident charging.
“Perhaps the biggest change,” she says, “was going from being a freelance writer who takes on writing projects to being a solopreneur running a freelance medical writing business. The biggest shift was coming into my identity as a writer and trusting what I have to bring to the table as being valuable.”
Similarly, Manisha came from a research background. Early in her CME work, even basic clarifying questions in subject matter expert or client conversations felt intimidating. What changed for her in 2025 wasn't just acquiring frameworks (although we have plenty in WriteCME Accelerator). It was permission to use them.
"I began thinking not just as a writer," she says, "but as an education partner. I now see my value and the difference I bring to each project. I focus on building strong, trusting relationships with clients so we can do better work together."~Manisha Jalan, PhD
Now Manisha trusts her judgment and feels confident building partnerships, not just delivering content.
Sunali Wadehra, MD, took the opposite path. After years as a solopreneur, she wanted deeper exposure to educational strategy within organizations. In 2025, she accepted a full-time role at an oncology-focused CME company. The move gave her something freelancing couldn’t: a view of how decisions get made upstream, before the brief ever reaches a writer. And she feels energized by understanding the system from the inside, not just serving it from the outside.
This shift isn't about acquiring new skills. It’s about claiming skills writers already have.
In 2025, stories from the WriteCME Pro community echo this pattern repeatedly: writers claiming niches, moving from reaction to intention, shaping scope instead of accepting it, shifting from hourly to per-project pricing, positioning themselves as business owners rather than available hands, and contributing earlier in the educational design process. The value they bring isn't just writing skill; it's the ability to interpret context, shape direction, and anticipate outcomes before being asked.
I’ve argued for years that these upstream contributions aren't optional extras for CME writers anymore. They're central to our value proposition. Writers who bring these competencies to CME clients aren't just supporting education—they're shaping it.
Confidence Built Through Clarity
Confidence was another word that came up frequently in coaching conversations this year. But not in the way you might expect. Writers weren't asking how to project confidence. They were asking whether they deserved to feel it: Am I ready for this? Can I charge this rate? When should I push back?
What’s interesting is that confidence typically arrives after we take on stretch projects, not before. After we name our niche, not before. Confidence emerges once we understand how the CME ecosystem works, have language for our role within it, and have tested that language in real conversations. Confidence emerged for WriteCME Pro writers from knowing what they were doing and why.
So here's the reframe: confidence isn't the starting point for CME writing success. Clarity is.
This reframe matters because it dismantles the assumption that imposter syndrome is a personal failing. Quite the opposite! More often, a lack of confidence signals that the system hasn't made roles, expectations, or pathways explicit. The CME field doesn't have clear onboarding. It doesn't publish a competency ladder. Writers are left to figure out where they fit, and then they blame themselves for feeling uncertain.
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But when writers gain language for their work and a framework for making decisions, something shifts. Confidence stops being a prerequisite and becomes a byproduct.
Community Spotlight
Alejandra spent years hesitating to position herself as an expert or to ask for compensation that reflected her expertise. She believed she needed more validation first. More experience. More proof. That experience resonates with me and I’ll bet it does with you too.
What moved Alejandra forward? Defining her niche. In 2025, she clarified her focus on patient-centered CME and began positioning herself accordingly in client conversations. The specificity gave her language she'd been missing.
The result? More interesting projects, greater impact, and, yes, higher compensation. As a result, Alejandra is moving into 2026 confident, specialized, and excited about expanding into new deliverables.
“Niche clarification gave me the confidence to position myself as an expert and start asking clients to consider my sub-niche when assigning projects.”
Ready to grow your niche? Get the Niche Discovery Checklist.
Zsuzsa discovered the same thing: once she redesigned her portfolio to reflect her actual direction, rather than waiting until she felt "ready," value-aligned clients started finding her.
She says, “This year shifted how I think about growth and timing. I used to believe that projects fully aligned with my goals would only come later, with many years of experience. I now see that clarity and intentionality in how I build and present my work play a much bigger role than I expected.”~Zsuzsa Csik MD
Néstor Zumaya’s path was different. He came from medical translation, not writing. But the obstacle was the same: imposter syndrome, fear of raising rates, uncertainty about whether he belonged in CME at all.
The unlock wasn't gaining more credentials. It was reframing his work from task-based to value-based. Once he saw translation and CME writing as complementary services rather than separate offerings, he could design a hybrid business model, shift to per-project pricing, and raise his rates with confidence.
“My business now feels purposeful, grounded in both sustainability and meaning.”
The through-line across these stories isn't motivation or mindset. It's perspective. Writers who gained clarity about how CME works, where they fit, and what they offer didn't have to summon confidence. They built it—decision by decision, conversation by conversation.
And in a field where roles remain under-defined, and pathways aren't mapped, that clarity is a competitive advantage.
AI, Ethics, and the Value of Human Judgment
If 2024 was the year CME writers asked ‘Will AI replace me?’, 2025 was the year the question matured. The answer, it turns out, is more nuanced than threat or opportunity. AI can support research, synthesis, and ideation but only when paired with human judgment, ethical awareness, and a clear process. Tools don't replace expertise. They amplify it when used well.
But the maturation has come with new pressures. AI has moved from novelty to expectation, compressing project timelines and raising clients' expectations for speed. That acceleration brings real risks: bias in outputs, hallucinations, and a lack of transparency about what's AI-generated and what isn't. In this environment, editorial reasoning and ethical discernment aren't just nice-to-haves; they're what differentiate a CME medical writer from a prompt operator.
Throughout 2025, WriteCME Pro community members raised variations of the same questions: How do I use AI responsibly? What do I disclose to clients? Where do I draw boundaries between AI assistance and my own judgment?
These aren't questions with universal answers, but they require answers nonetheless. Writers who can articulate not just what decisions they made but how and why they made them will maintain their professional relevance. Those who can't will find themselves competing solely on speed.
2025 also reinforced something that predates AI but becomes more urgent alongside it: the ethical weight of language. Clinicians and patients are navigating information overload, conflicting guidelines, and widespread misinformation. Science has become increasingly politicized. In this context, providing evidence isn't enough. How you frame that evidence shapes whether it lands.
And so language choice, narrative ethics, and centering the lived experience of both clinicians and patients all matter to educational impact. In complex or emotionally charged areas of care, they matter even more.
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This is what ethical discernment looks like in practice: not just avoiding AI pitfalls, but actively centering human experience in educational design.
Community Spotlight
Like Siddharth, who came to CME writing with strong clinical and public health training but a diffuse sense of direction. What focused him wasn't a tool or technique. It was recognizing that his lived experience as a professional with autism was itself a form of expertise. In 2025, he secured a full-time Associate Scientific Director role where he applies a neurodiversity-affirmative, patient-centered lens to every project.
“This role has profoundly strengthened my confidence”, he says, “expanded my scientific and educational skill set, and given me a renewed sense of direction as a medical communicator. Just as importantly, it aligns seamlessly with my lived experience as an autistic professional, empowering me to embrace a neurodiversity-affirmative approach to medical education. By centering patient experience and inclusivity, I am able to craft content that is thoughtful, accessible, and responsive to diverse ways of learning—bridging science with empathy.”
Wellbeing as Professional Infrastructure
One personal moment from 2025 has stayed with me. I was leading a wellbeing session at the ACEhp conference in Orlando, scheduled for 30 minutes, though I'd mistakenly planned for 60 (sorry, not sorry!). While a handful of attendees left when we ran over, most stayed. It was a small thing, but it clarified something for me: in a high-pressure system like CME, space to pause isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. And increasingly, it's a professional imperative.
In the WriteCME Pro community, we've started talking about wellbeing differently—not as self-care or work-life balance, but as capacity. The ability to sustain good judgment over time. As medical writers we often experience decision fatigue, cognitive overload, and difficulty maintaining intensity across long projects. These aren't personal failings. They're occupational realities.
Once we named these realities as collective challenges rather than individual weaknesses, something shifted. Over the year, WriteCME Pro members started making structural changes: scaling back teaching roles, leaving full-time positions, saying no to misaligned work, and restructuring schedules to protect their capacity to think clearly.
These weren't lifestyle upgrades. They were professional decisions to support longevity, judgment, and the quality of the work itself.
Community Spotlight
Brittane was working full-time while building a freelance CME writing practice on the side. She knew the balance was unsustainable, even as she kept pushing. In 2025, she made the leap: left her full-time role, committed fully to freelance, and nearly matched her previous salary within the year.
But the bigger shift was internal. Launching her business forced her to develop self-advocacy and boundary-setting skills she'd avoided before. The workload she's built now supports her mental health, not just her income.
“It feels stable and real,” she says, “not risky or temporary.”
Sandy Marshall faced a version of the same capacity challenge. As a freelance CME writer balancing academic roles at the University of Toronto with family responsibilities, she found herself with only one or two days per week for her freelance business. Teaching and home life absorbed everything else. She could maintain her CME work at that pace, but she couldn't grow it or fully apply the skills she'd been developing through WriteCME Accelerator.
In the second half of 2025, she made a structural decision: scale back her teaching so freelance projects could take centre stage. The shift gave her enough time to recruit new clients, take on more complex projects, and put the advanced techniques she'd learned to use. The change wasn't about doing more. It was about creating the conditions to do the work well.
Nilakshika, a physician building a CME writing business in her 40s, also hit a wall. Family responsibilities, time pressure, and her own expectations left her depleted before she'd really begun.
“There were moments I was utterly disappointed as I could not find time for myself. I realized that a lot of my energy got wasted when I couldn’t achieve my target. I felt like walking with a heavy load on top of my head. ”
The turning point came when she stopped treating slow growth as failure and started treating it as a strategy. She leaned into her Buddhism to cultivate grounding practices, recalibrated her timeline, and launched her business with clarity instead of exhaustion.
This is what wellbeing-as-infrastructure actually means: protecting the capacity for judgment, not just the capacity for output. In a field that increasingly depends on discernment and ethical reasoning, burnout isn't just a personal cost. It's a risk to the work itself.
Looking Ahead: What 2026 Demands of CME Writers
The landscape is clear. CME is functioning as a translation layer between unstable science and clinical action. Funders are demanding measurable outcomes. AI is compressing timelines while amplifying ethical complexity. And the scope of CME writing itself has expanded, requiring writers to act as learning designers, evidence interpreters, and systems thinkers.
Yet hiring models and role definitions haven't caught up. Most job postings or project briefs still describe narrow, task-based ‘writer’ roles. And there's a significant gap between the strategic work CME medical writers actually perform and the training or professional development pathways available to reflect it.
This gap isn't going to close on its own. And waiting for the industry to recognize what you do isn't a strategy.
“BTW, this gap is exactly why WriteCME Pro is CPD-certified. It’s the only training specifically for CME writers that has been externally validated for quality assurance and relevance for professional development. ”
So what does it mean to be a CME writer in 2026?
It means building clarity about where you fit in the educational ecosystem and communicating that clarity with intention.
It means treating your judgment as a core competency, not a soft skill.
It means protecting your capacity for discernment, because burnout doesn't just affect your wellbeing; it affects your work.
The core competencies for CME writers have shifted. Technical skill remains foundational, but it's no longer sufficient. The writers thriving in the CME environment are the ones who can:
Contextualize uncertainty when the evidence doesn't offer clean answers
Make their reasoning visible—showing why they prioritized certain sources and where uncertainty remains
Contribute upstream, shaping educational strategy rather than just executing it
Set boundaries that protect the quality of their judgment over time
If you're asking how to become a CME writer today, the honest answer is that the path isn't mapped (except in WriteCME Pro, where you’ll get access to a CPD-certified curriculum, coaching, and community). The field doesn't publish a competency ladder or a standard onboarding sequence. That's frustrating—but it's also an opportunity. Writers who develop clarity about their value, position themselves intentionally, and invest in their own professional infrastructure aren't waiting for permission. They're defining what strategic partnership looks like, one project at a time.
That's the work of 2026. Not just responding to disruption—but shaping what comes next.