"I look at it as, what are my trade-offs? What do I have to take on, whether it's a side effect or a time commitment, and what am I going to get out of it?"
Sara Noonan
Patient Communications Expert
How might your approach to pharma communications shift if you suddenly found yourself on the patient side?
Sara Noonan has dedicated nearly two decades to building patient communications in rare disease and oncology, holding roles as the Senior Director of Product and Pipeline Communications for Servier Pharmaceuticals and Director of Public Relations and Investor Relations in the oncology business unit at Takeda.
In this episode, Sara joins Kristen to reflect on how becoming a rare disease patient herself has reshaped her thinking about patient education, advocacy, and what it really means to be “patient-centered.”
For almost 20 years, Sara crafted communications to serve people navigating rare diseases and cancer, always striving to put patients at the heart of her work. But when she found herself on the other side of the table, as a patient seeking answers for a rare lung condition, everything shifted. Suddenly, the day-to-day realities of scheduling appointments and managing treatments were no longer abstract—they were her lived experience. That firsthand journey reshaped her understanding of what it truly means to be patient-centered.
Inside patient Facebook groups, she sees people wrestling with whether to take their prescribed medication—a vivid reminder of how much essential education is still missing, even among those already in treatment. At the same time, she’s now intimately familiar with the emotional calculus patients face: weighing side effects, time commitments, and the uncertainty of outcomes. Living these tradeoffs herself brought new clarity to what patient-centered communication really entails.
Expertly Said is a podcast on the art and impact of communication. Each episode features a conversation about how people connect with understand and influence one another.
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