Three questions with Julia Lakeland
Julia Lakeland
Chief Customer Success Officer
As uMotif’s Chief Customer Success Officer, Julia is responsible for creating the vision of what success embodies for our customers, communicating that vision across our organization, and ensuring its execution.
Julia has over 25 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, with a strong track record in shaping strategic vision, driving business growth, and leading operational excellence. She heads a high-performing team focused on transforming complex clinical trial protocols into innovative, user-centric solutions that enhance customer satisfaction and accelerate trial delivery.
Deeply committed to improving the user experience in clinical trials, Julia is passionate about advancing products and services that support the safe and timely introduction of new treatments to market. Throughout her career, she has specialized in designing and delivering technical solutions for clinical trials, with a focus on Phases III and IV.
What’s your vision for customer success and how does your team enable it?
uMotif redefines traditional eCOA clinical trial solutions by delivering transformative, user-centric eClinical solutions that exceed customer expectations. Our objective is to ensure customers are our biggest fans and promoters by delivering exceptional service and being their preferred partner of choice. Our customer partnerships start with study design, and we continue to walk alongside our clients throughout their journey, providing critical guidance and sharing best practices rooted in our deep real-world experience. I want clients to come to uMotif because our Customer Success team members foster trust, demonstrate expertise and communicate with transparency—inspiring the utmost customer confidence, ensuring that every study is completed on scope, on time, and with the highest quality.
Can you share a few of the most important best practices when incorporating uMotif eCOA/ePRO technology?
Success starts with a clear understanding of what you want to measure and why. The ability to gather incredibly rich and varied data is one of the most powerful benefits of eCOA/ePRO technology. However, it’s still the patient or caregiver who must input this data.
Capturing too much data—which is not essential to the study—and selecting a scale that is too cumbersome can create an undue burden on patients and caregivers. This, in turn, can have a negative impact on engagement and retention. We encourage sponsors and study teams to carefully consider the patient and site burden when identifying data requirements and scale selection and then strike a balance that aligns the user experience and desired protocol outcomes.
Second, it’s important to recognize that eCOA is so much more than simply presenting a paper questionnaire on a screen. People expect a more intuitive and personalized experience when they engage digitally. The goal is to capture the right data at the right time via an interface that makes it as easy as possible for the patient, caregiver, and site.
You see many protocols. What trends are you watching, and how is uMotif helping sponsors and CROs to respond to and leverage them?
We’re watching and participating in several important developments. While end-to-end data validity and verification continue to be fundamental, today we’re witnessing a greater understanding of the power of a patient- or participant-centric mindset to advance data quality and study engagement.
For example, sponsors and clinical trial designers are more carefully considering the functional design of not just questionnaires but the overall interface that underpins how they are presented to patients and how they interact with them.
We’re also seeing the concept of participant-centricity extend to caregivers who play an integral role in data capture for certain types of studies, such as pediatric and central nervous system (CNS) clinical trials. Patients in these trials may have multiple caregivers, each of whom is helping to input data. This can create greater complexity and lead to data integrity challenges. uMotif’s Care Cluster solution addresses these challenges and helps participants and their caregivers function as an integrated team. For example, it attributes data to each caregiver for greater transparency and allows caregivers to view previously edited data.
Finally, we cannot ignore the growing application of AI (including generative and agentic AI) across various industries. The life sciences industry is, in general, optimistically cautious about AI’s potential to drive new levels of efficiency, agility, and insight. The focus for many clinical development organizations today is on understanding which use cases might make the most sense for their enterprise and on ensuring that they can leverage AI responsibly.
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn to arrange a meeting, or to discuss more about how uMotif’s eCOA/ePRO platform can transform patient engagement in your next study.