MLR Review for Marketing Content: A Workflow That Ships Weekly

MLR stands for medical, legal, and regulatory review. It is the process a pharma, biotech, device, or diagnostics company uses to check promotional content before it reaches a clinician or a patient: is every claim supported, is the balance of benefit and risk fair, does anything imply an off label use. Nothing goes out without it, and at most companies it is the reason the blog has one post from March.

How long it takes, and why

Vodori's 2025 State of Promotional Review benchmarks put the average job at 14.8 days from submission to approval, up from 13.8 the year before, with the review itself averaging 7.6 days. At mid size and large pharma, Indegene reports cycles of 50 to 60 days per piece. The reasons are structural: review runs over email, the claim gets rewritten mid cycle, the same reference gets checked for the fourth time, and the reviewer is a physician with a day job. The FDA's Office of Prescription Drug Promotion is not slowing down either, so cutting corners is not the fix.

What a smaller company can do that pharma cannot

A 40 person diagnostics company or a specialty practice group does not need a committee. It needs one named reviewer with an MD or PhD credential, a claim library, and a log. The workflow we run for clients has four parts. First, the claim library: every clinical, safety, or efficacy statement the company is allowed to make, with its reference, approved once. Second, content written from the library, so 80 percent of a post is already approved language. Third, the reviewer sees only the new claims, flagged, with the reference attached, in a single weekly batch. Fourth, a sign off log with the reviewer's name, the date, and the version, which is what you produce when anyone asks.

The weekly cadence

Monday, drafts go to the reviewer with new claims flagged. Wednesday, the reviewer returns one batch of comments. Thursday, revisions, and anything the reviewer rejected is either cut or moved to next week. Friday, publish. One reviewer hour a week supports a newsletter, a blog post, and a month of social. Content that does not touch a clinical claim, a founder story, a hiring post, an event recap, skips the gate entirely, which is most of it.

What it costs and what you provide

As an add on to our tiers: $500 a month plus $750 setup on Baseline, $750 plus $1,000 on Catalyst, $1,200 plus $1,500 on Kinetic, quoted on Critical Mass. Setup is building the claim library from your existing approved materials. You provide the reviewer. We do not supply one, because the person signing off on your claims should be accountable to you.

The mistake to avoid

Do not let the reviewer see the whole draft. A physician reviewing prose reviews the prose, and you get comments on word choice that take two more cycles. Flag the claims, attach the references, and ask one question: approved, revised, or cut.

The ask: if your content calendar is stalled behind review, book a pipeline call and bring your last approved piece and the email thread that approved it. We will show you where the 14 days went.