We help healthcare organizations close the lived experience gap.
Patient- and caregiver-led insight, strategy, and documentary storytelling that helps healthcare teams close the gap between what healthcare measures and what people actually live.
TRUSTED BY HEALTHCARE, ADVOCACY AND ACADEMIC PARTNERS
The truth about a patient's life
doesn't live in a dashboard.
It lives in their kitchen.
Their waiting room.
The text they send at 2 a.m.
Healthcare measures outcomes. We uncover the lived experiences behind them—revealing what organizations need to make better decisions.
WHO WE WORK WITH
Medical Affairs
Patient Engagement
Brand & Marketing
MSL & HCP Education
Lived Experience Discovery
OUR APPROACH
Before you build anything,
understand what you don’t know.
HOW WE WORK
Every engagement can begin with discovery—or grow into a complete lived experience program. Each piece stands on its own. Together, they're even stronger.
-
Most healthcare projects start with the deliverable already decided — a video, a campaign, a training module. The real work usually sits one step earlier: figuring out what patients and caregivers are actually experiencing that your organization hasn't understood yet.
That's the conversation we have before anything gets built. We help you find the real question — not "what are we filming" but "what are we actually trying to understand" — then shape a process around it: who to talk to, what to ask, what a useful answer would even look like.
-
Raw material — interviews, footage, conversations — holds more than any single deliverable uses. Before production, we mine it to inform what you build. After, we go back into what didn't make the cut. Either way, we're analyzing for themes, gaps, and unmet needs, and delivering findings that shape the next phase.
-
We find people through relationships, not recruiting panels — advocacy organizations, patient communities, caregivers who trust us enough to make an introduction. That trust is the difference between someone who shows up to answer questions and someone who shows up ready to be honest.
For clients, that looks like: recruiting for qualitative research, advisory work, or on-camera storytelling where participants arrive prepared, supported, and safe. -
Photography and film, created with people who've lived what they're documenting and following a patient-centered production process — not a crew learning the subject matter on the job. That's what gets someone to say something on camera they've never said out loud. Everything is built for where it's actually going to be used: internal training, HCP education, patient-facing content, conference activations. And it moves through Medical, Legal, and Regulatory review without surprises — MLR is part of how we scope a project from the start, not something we scramble to fit in after.
FOUNDER’S STORY
When Anna Rathkopf was diagnosed with cancer, she and her husband Jordan picked up their cameras to make sense of what they were living through.
That work earned international recognition, but more importantly, it exposed a persistent gap between what healthcare tracks and what patients actually experience.
RATHKOPF was built to help healthcare teams see that gap clearly — and act on it. We now work with a team of experts with their own lived experience. Ten years. A roster of people across illness, caregiving, and survivorship, built one relationship at a time.
Let's understand what your patients are living—not just what your data is measuring.
Let's talk before you decide what to build.