About Monica St Claire

Monica St Claire is a sociolinguist formerly working at Inspire.
Former Product Lead, Insight

Getting the Most from Clinical Trial Protocol Feasibility Studies

Getting the Most from Clinical Trial Protocol Feasibility Studies By Monica St Claire Webinar provides expert tips for getting real feasibility data, optimizing trial design When the drug development process is at the point of moving to clinical trial, the next step is conducting a feasibility study. Stakeholders are all looking to hit the jackpot: figuring out the best place to conduct the clinical study, and identifying the design factors that result in maximum patient retention. Recently, the topic of the WCG Institute’s podcast “Stump the Experts” was feasibility. It featured Diane Carozza and Danya Kaye, [...]

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Nov 2019By |0 Comments

How You Can Achieve Patient Focused Drug Development

How You Can Achieve Patient Focused Drug Development By Monica St Claire The application of a sociolinguistic lens can glean hidden meanings within seemingly ordinary communications. On the Society of Linguists website, Walt Wolfram, director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University said, “We use language to send vital social messages about who we are, where we come from, and who we associate with.” Wolfram says that we can learn much about a person just by their choice of a single word.1 In the area of health communication, linguists identify [...]

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Nov 2018By |0 Comments

Can social media help uncover insights about the patient journey?

Can social media help uncover insights about the patient journey? By Monica St Claire Does patients’ social media content truly reflect the real world experience of patients in general? Can it uncover insights about the patient journey? This question tends to come up when someone is new to this type of research. It’s a good question. Social media’s pervasive presence has been documented by Pew Research, among others, finding that Facebook is used by 74% of Americans on a daily basis, over half saying it is used more than once-a-day, and that 73% of Americans use multiple [...]

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Oct 2018By |0 Comments

Implementing patient centricity?

Implementing patient centricity? By Monica St. Claire Over 1,000 employees from bio-pharmaceutical, medical device and associated supplier companies responded to the Aurora Project’s recent Patient-Centric Benchmarks Survey. Of those respondents, 91% said patient centricity is important, a 6% increase from 2016. But only 30% believe the industry can make it a reality. Knowing how to be patient centric seems to be the missing ingredient. Only 22% of respondents agreed with this statement, “We know exactly what and how to teach [patient centricity] to our people.”1 While many articles call patient centricity a “mantra” and “cliché,”2 Inspire [...]

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Sep 2018By |0 Comments

How R&D Teams Can Use Patient-Centricity for Clinical Trial Optimization

How R&D Teams Can Use Patient Centricity for Clinical Trial Optimization By Monica St. Claire In 2014, Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development performed a comprehensive assessment of the use of social media and digital technology in clinical research. This forward-thinking study revealed that pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies and contract research organizations (CROs) had not implemented strategies to effectively utilize and capitalize on the patient and caregiver content available.1 Today, Inspire’s products and services address these clinical trial optimization essentials. Specifically, our tools provide pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies’ research and development (R&D) teams as well [...]

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Aug 2018By |0 Comments

What is a Virtual Advisory Board product?

What is a Virtual Advisory Board product? By Monica St. Claire Almost 60 percent of all clinical trial protocols have at least one amendment. Amendments lower the numbers of recruited patients as well as increase the cost of clinical trials according to Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Impact Study from 2016.1  Obtaining input from patients and caregivers early in the protocol development process could prevent many amendments. This is just one reason to consider an Inspire virtual advisory board. Virtual advisory boards provide clients with a long-term opportunity to engage with key patients [...]

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Aug 2018By |0 Comments

Brain Tumors-What patients and their caregivers need-An Inspire Insights: Engage Case Study

Brain Tumors - What patients and caregivers need - An Inspire Insights: Engage Case Study By Monica St. Claire Almost 80,000 adults will be diagnosed with brain or spinal cord tumors in the US this year.1 Seven hundred thousand are living with brain tumors in the US today.1 Although extensive media coverage of political figures, Joseph “Beau” Biden and Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, as well as Senator John McCain’s July 2017 diagnosis, has placed a spotlight on an extremely aggressive and rare brain cancer, glioblastoma, there are actually over 120 different types of brain or spinal cord [...]

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Aug 2018By |0 Comments

Learning from patients to improve their experiences with treatments – An Inspire Insights: Discover Case Study

Learning from patients to improve their experiences with treatments - An Inspire Insights: Discover Case Study By Monica St. Claire Around 68,000 people in the US are diagnosed with bladder cancer each year.  Since 2007, in partnership with the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, Inspire has been providing support to patients and caregivers living with bladder cancer. Today, the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network Support Community on Inspire has over 32,000 members and an additional 21,320 worldwide visitors per month. As the leading social networking site in the US, Inspire is home to [...]

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Jul 2018By |0 Comments

Qualitative analysis informs all of Inspire’s research offerings: An Inspire Engage case study

Qualitative analysis informs all of Inspire’s research offerings: An Inspire Engage case study By Monica St. Claire "Where is the understanding we have lost in knowledge?” ~T. S. Eliot 1 Inspire’s research team approaches all its work by first becoming immersed in patients’ and caregivers’ “in-the-moment” sense-making. The tool they use, qualitative research, is the listening side of scientific exploration. In its many formats - social listening, thematic analysis, linguistic analysis - qualitative research makes sense of phenomena using the meanings that people bring to them, understanding experiences through their view of the world. 2 An [...]

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Jul 2018By |0 Comments