Frequently Asked Questions

Want to know more about FIXING US and our approach to authentic health content creation? Explore our answers to FAQs about who we are, how we work, services we provide and how we help healthcare and life sciences clients and partners to achieve meaningful, measurable impact through authentic content.

About Fixing-Us AUTHENTIC CONTENT Results & Proof Audiences & strategy
Services & capabilities Recruitment & participants Compliance consent & data Working with us

About FIXING US

  • FIXING US grew out of Fixing Dad, one family’s journey and campaign to tackle a father’s type-2 diabetes and cancer diagnosis, which became a feature documentary broadcast by the BBC and was seen by millions of viewers without any media investment. That journey proved that authentic, brand-sponsored patient stories could reach national broadcast, engage NHS and policy leaders, and inspire other patients to begin their own journeys. The frameworks created for Fixing Dad became the foundation of the FIXING US methodology and approach, now used by some of the world’s largest pharma, biotech and healthcare-related organisations, including documentaries with the BBC and Amazon and a full television series on NBC in the United States.

  • FIXING US can be a strategic partner, not simply a production supplier. In addition to delivering video and other forms of content, our extensive experience enables us to help clients embed patient voices into wider business processes, strategies and decision-making. Our capabilities span project design, participant recruitment, bias reduction and multiple types of footage capture – enabling us to deliver stakeholder-engagement mechanisms, events and virtual forums, as well as qualitative research and insights via our AI-powered Authentic Intelligence™ tool.

  • FIXING US works with external- and internal-facing teams from leading global and local pharma, biotech and healthcare-related brands, as well as health system stakeholders including patient advocacy groups (PAGs), healthcare professionals (HCPs), key opinion leaders (KOLs), charities, public bodies and policymakers. We are trusted by clients including AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Daiichi-Sankyo, Novartis, Roche, Pfizer, Dexcom, Ascensia, Prudential, GSK, Bayer, Valneva, BBC, NHS England, NBC, Medela, Valneva, Amazon, SwissRe, CellCentric, Nestlé Health Science, Raisio and Air Liquide.

  • FIXING US specialises in healthcare and differs fundamentally from conventional content creators and agencies by producing authentic, unscripted content – raw narrative stories rooted in real lived experience – rather than conventional curated, scripted or simulated material. Our approach captures the physiological and psychological nuances that scripted content cannot replicate, while remaining fully aligned with each brand’s strategic goals, frameworks, messaging and processes. Uniquely, our methodology not only delivers powerful content for clients and broadcasters but also functions as a stakeholder-engagement mechanism, enabling transparent recruitment and collaboration between diverse groups (including brands, patient advocacy groups, charities, clinicians and policymakers) in ways that conventional content creation cannot facilitate.

  • FIXING US is a specialist and global leader in creating authentic health content derived from real-life patient journeys and the lived experiences of a wide range of stakeholders, including caregivers, physicians, healthcare professionals (HCPs), providers and policymakers. We work in global and local markets with pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare-related brands as well as health systems to produce authentic content and other diffusions that improve internal and external communications, accelerates stakeholder-engagement and alignment, increases patient and HCP engagement, and increases return-on-investment (ROI).

Authentic Content

  • Yes – FIXING US continuously works with clients, health systems and academic partners to build the evidence base for authentic content and patient-voice integration in health innovation. Drawing on industry reports, case-based evidence and academic citations, a growing body of research supports the effectiveness of authentic content – including one example of new research, available free at doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/d2n3r_v1, that directly examines authentic content as a strategic imperative and as a highly effective mechanism for multi-level stakeholder engagement, enhanced patient access and stronger financial outcomes.

  • Authentic content is proven to be effective at every stage of health innovation – not just at later, commercial stages. Across all stages, authentic content supports stronger engagement and collaboration with patients, healthcare professionals and internal and external stakeholders. There are many examples of effective use of authentic content to support global and local deployment, education, disease awareness and marketing but the earlier it is used, the more transformative it is in outcomes and efficiencies for patients and brands. With the support of peer-reviewed research, we have learned that it can be particularly effective earlier in the lifecycle, supporting clinical trials (enhancing recruitment, increasing trust, collaboration and adherence, reducing protocol amendments, and supporting the presentation of findings) and Health Technology Assessment submissions (supporting more effective, patient-centric submissions aligned with regulatory recommendations).

  • At FIXING US, journeys are defined by a specific pathway that is relevant to a brand’s context. A journey may span from initial diagnosis, through discovery and treatment, to patient advocacy – or it may simply focus on a single encounter with a healthcare professional in response to a discrete unmet need. FIXING US-created journeys are authentic and dynamic, not static or retrospective, and can encompass barriers, motivations, adherence realities, family dynamics, care pathways and systemic friction points. Critically, the process of creating authentic journeys naturally brings together stakeholders – healthcare professionals, charities, patient groups, professional bodies, policymakers and brands – around a shared, patient-centric purpose, making the journeys powerful mechanisms for stakeholder engagement in their own right.

  • Yes – authenticity and brand alignment are fully compatible. It is a major misconception that authenticity prevents alignment with brand goals, or that compliance, legal and ethical safeguards require content to be scripted or pre-determined. FIXING US specialises in producing content that is both authentic and fully aligned to a client’s communications and business needs, something we call authentic+. We have many Case Studies that include content that became celebrated corporate films using entirely unscripted footage and exchanges, without conventional scripting or storyboards, that met the full demands of corporate branding, product messaging and style guides while powering multiple branded and unbranded deployments from a single production.

  • Authentic content is a documentary-grade record of a real journey as it happens, not a rehearsed endorsement delivered after the fact and not sponsored opinion from a paid creator. Testimonials compress an experience into an approved statement; influencer content borrows a personality’s audience. Authentic content instead follows patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals through the genuine texture of their experience (including uncertainty, lapses and difficult conversations) which is precisely what makes it credible to sceptical audiences, deployable within regulated frameworks, and valuable as a mechanism for engaging clinicians, advocacy groups and policymakers around the story.

  • Authentic content outperforms curated or scripted video because it closes the credibility gap: narratives that feel manufactured diminish trust and trigger scepticism among patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals and other stakeholders, while real people with real lived experience produce measurably higher empathic engagement. The results are demonstrable – a FIXING US TV series for Dexcom increased consideration of its product by 120%, and a £300,000 co-creation mechanism for Novartis returned £11.9–£23.8 million annually in incremental value in addition to accelerating health system redesign and patient access. A growing body of evidence shows that authentic content inspires audiences, influences behaviours, improves treatment adherence, increases stakeholder engagement and collaboration, drives innovation, and acts as a proxy for institutional transparency.

  • Authentic content is video content and other diffusions derived from the unscripted, unstaged, real-life experiences of actual patients, caregivers and other stakeholders – not actors, not staged recreations and not storyboarded narratives. It is designed to capture the physiological, psychological and emotional nuances of lived experience that scripted or curated content cannot replicate. Unlike conventional health content such as animated explainers, simulated training videos, promotional films using actors, scripted accounts or aspirational advertising, authentic content delivers measurable engagement, credibility and a natural mechanism for multi-stakeholder engagement – all while remaining fully aligned with brand strategies, campaigns and compliance requirements.

Results & Proof

  • Measurement is designed into each project against the outcomes that matter to the client – there is no single vanity metric. Depending on the objective, we and our clients have measured brand awareness, recall and consideration lift, organic reach, watch time and retention, adherence, behaviours, uplifts in healthcare professional and stakeholder meetings, acceleration of access and system change, earned media value, and financial return on investment. And our AI-powered Authentic Intelligence™ tool adds a further layer of diffusions and supports insights-generation, providing qualitative insight from raw footage itself about behaviours, emotions, barriers and motivators.

  • Yes. FIXING US content has powered two winners of the PMEA Award for Excellence in Patient Education and Support – Novartis’s Fighting Failure campaign and AstraZeneca’s Break Over-Reliance asthma campaign – and Fighting Failure was also a Communiqué Awards finalist for Excellence in Patient Programmes. Beyond formal awards, benchmarks such as becoming AstraZeneca’s #1 ranked YouTube content demonstrate recognition where it matters most: audience behaviour.

  • Yes, authentic patient voices have repeatedly opened doors that conventional communications cannot. FIXING US content has headlined the United Nations General Assembly’s Mental Health Summit and World Health Assembly policy debates for Boehringer Ingelheim; helped elevate eye care to a national policy priority for Roche, contributing to the appointment of England’s first National Clinical Director for Eye Care; united competing pharma leaders behind the Speak Up for COPD coalition and its Global Advocacy Standard; and been deployed in the UK Parliament as part of Novartis’s Fighting Failure campaign.

  • Yes, FIXING US content has been broadcast by the BBC, NBC and Amazon Prime Video, and has earned leading national media placement without paid support. Fixing Dad aired as a feature documentary on the BBC and drew millions of viewers with zero media investment; the FIXING US series ran as a full season on NBC and COZI with features across the Today Show and NBC lifestyle programming; and a Roche diabetes series led Mail Online’s Health section for three consecutive weeks as earned media. Authentic stories are broadcastable in a way that conventional branded content is not, which is precisely what makes them so efficient, and all of our work is in partnership with brands.

  • Authentic content can deliver measurable return-on-investment (ROI), and it can be quantified. The clearest published example is Fighting Failure for Novartis: a £300,000 co-creation mechanism that accelerated NHS system redesign, sped patient access by 3 to 6 months per patient, and delivered incremental return on investment of £11.9–£23.8 million annually between 2021 and 2023 alone. Return is generated through multiple routes: faster access and adoption, earned media replacing paid media, multi-year content reuse, and the commercial value of stronger stakeholder relationships – and we can help design measurement into each project from the outset.

  • Documented results include a full NBC television season for Dexcom that delivered more than 69 million viewer impressions, 88% brand recall and a 120% increase in intent to use its product; a Novartis stakeholder co-creation mechanism that accelerated NHS heart failure service redesign by 3 to 5 years and was estimated to have returned £11.9–£23.8 million annually from a £300,000 investment; and a lung cancer stigma series that became AstraZeneca’s #1 ranked YouTube content with 1.1 million organic views – one hundred times typical channel performance. Full details, methods and further examples are published in our case studies.

Audiences & Strategy

  • The Health Innovation System (HIS) Framework is a conceptual model for healthcare innovation, positing that embedding authentic content within a drug innovation lifecycle increases collaboration and value generation across all development stages. The framework demonstrates how incorporating patient voices early in the innovation process can shift the development trajectory – increasing engagement, accelerating timelines, maximising market commercial exclusivity and significantly improving return on investment.

  • FIXING US creates content that adds value across the full health ecosystem: patients and caregivers; healthcare professionals; policymakers and payors; patient advocacy groups; charities; internal stakeholders, globally and locally; and broadcast audiences via sponsored television programmes on networks including NBC in the United States, the BBC in the United Kingdom and Amazon Prime Video. A single film can be designed to appeal to multiple stakeholders, or a suite of targeted content assets can be produced from the footage, each tailored to specific audiences.

  • Yes. FIXING US has a strong track record of helping clients maximise impact at internal and external congresses, events, conferences and presentations, demonstrating increased adoption of solutions and strategies among customers, partners, colleagues and affiliates. Content created for events can also be repurposed for internal and external diffusion, ongoing campaigns and corporate communications, as well as providing a platform for advocacy – extending its value well beyond the original engagement.

  • Yes, authentic content is as powerful inside an organisation as outside it. Many clients deploy FIXING US-created content for internal engagement, learning and culture: global and local brand teams at AstraZeneca use the same authentic productions for corporate films and internal activities; Medela’s global and local market leaders adopted its NICU films internally; and content created for external campaigns is routinely repurposed for onboarding, training, congress preparation and leadership communications – reconnecting commercial teams with the patients their work ultimately serves.

  • Authentic content is highly effective for all health system stakeholders, not only patients and caregivers. FIXING US produces content for, and featuring, healthcare professionals (HCPs), physicians, key opinion leaders (KOLs), nurses, hospital workers, providers, scientists, payors and policymakers. Content can be created with a single stakeholder group as its focus, or designed to resonate with multiple audiences simultaneously. For professional audiences, authentic and patient-centric storytelling consistently outperforms data-heavy brochures and curated content in attention, recall and engagement – with our Lightbulb Moments campaign for AstraZeneca, built on doctors’ own stories, powered an award-winning global change in asthma prescribing conversations.t

Services & Capabilities

  • Content and usage rights are agreed per project to match each client’s needs, and FIXING US content is designed for reuse from the outset. Because participant consent, compliance clearances and modular production are built in from the start, a single production routinely powers branded and unbranded activity, global and local deployments, internal and external channels, and multi-year campaigns. All of our work is with clients and sponsors, in accordance with regulations and norms, and we work hard to help clients and partners to maximise their distribution, diffusions, repurposing and reuse.

  • FIXING US delivers authentic content locally and multilingual content globally, operating across Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. We have produced content from more than 20 countries across all continents so far – and, whether through in-person filming or remotely captured footage, there is no health system or country from which we cannot create content and no language that we cannot capture footage or deliver content in.

  • FIXING US works across all therapeutic areas, with examples of our work and published case studies spanning mental health (schizophrenia and major depressive disorder), oncology (lung cancer, breast cancer and multiple myeloma), cardiovascular disease (heart failure, hypertension and cholesterol management), renal and metabolic conditions (diabetes, chronic kidney disease and hyperkalemia), respiratory medicine (asthma, COPD and sleep apnea), ophthalmology, neonatal care, paediatric nutrition, weight management and vaccines. Recruitment and production expertise extends further, including rare disease, gene therapies, immunology, neurology and weight management.

  • Yes. Because of the broad range of techniques FIXING US employs to capture footage, we can deliver both edited content and raw footage to support a range of communications and research needs. The measures we take to reduce bias in footage are central to our SaaS Authentic Intelligence™ tool – an AI-powered large language model that uses transcripts from authentic patient and stakeholder interactions to generate qualitative insights about behaviours, emotions, barriers and motivators, delivering almost unlimited analytical value from the footage we collect for clients.

  • FIXING US offers both a turnkey service and bespoke solution that can fit any client system and process, and we have expertise and experience at each. We offer a full turnkey service that minimises the burden on client workflows within proven delivery frameworks, and we also adapt to client systems, shaping around specific organisational resources, processes, teams and compliance requirements. Within a single client organisation we may deliver turnkey projects for some teams and bespoke modular services that integrate with existing internal teams and agencies for others, depending on brand maturity, strategic needs and existing relationships. We are flexible and adapt to different frameworks, processes and constraints.

Recruitment & Participants

  • No, recruitment supports a much wider range of activities than video content creation. FIXING US recruits stakeholders for filmed content, virtual forums, advisory-style discussions, stakeholder-engagement programmes, qualitative research, insight generation, internal learning, congress activity, patient panels, advocacy initiatives, campaign development, message testing, content diffusion and for some of our clients’ and partners’ special projects.

  • FIXING US is set up to move quickly, with timelines depending on cohort complexity, geography and eligibility criteria. Common-condition cohorts within one or several markets can typically be recruited and screened within a few weeks; complex briefs – rare-disease patients, niche key opinion leaders, policymakers or hard-to-reach communities – can typically be recruited within two to eight weeks, including the time required to liaise with internal compliance, patient-engagement and legal teams.

  • Yes, and this is one of the highest-impact incremental benefits. Participants who have authentically contributed to content frequently become advocates for it, sharing it through their own personal and professional networks, patient communities, professional bodies and advocacy channels. With consent and compliance safeguards managed by FIXING US, participants can support launch events, panel discussions, media moments, congress activations, disease awareness initiatives, sponsored broadcasts and digital amplification campaigns – converting a production into a sustainable, multi-channel engagement programme that significantly extends reach, credibility and return on investment.

  • Recruitment is the foundational step of the wider stakeholder-engagement mechanism, delivering value well beyond the footage. By identifying and onboarding diverse groups – pharma brands, patient advocacy groups, charities, clinicians and policymakers – the process naturally aligns stakeholders around a shared, patient-centric purpose from the very beginning. Participants help shape narrative direction, validate messaging, advise on tone and represent their wider communities; become advocates or provide a meaningful platform for advocacy; and the relationships formed activate well before filming begins and endure long after delivery, supporting content diffusion, advisory work, subsequent messaging, research and ongoing engagement.

  • Authentic content depends on engaging the right people in the right way – recruitment is central to its credibility, relevance and impact, not an operational afterthought. By recruiting patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, key opinion leaders, policymakers and other stakeholders thoughtfully and compliantly, FIXING US helps clients create content and engagement programmes that are grounded in genuine lived experience, strategically aligned, and capable of influencing behaviour, understanding and decision-making.

  • Yes, FIXING US recruits across all therapeutic areas and can target highly specific subgroups by disease stage, treatment line, comorbidity, age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, caregiver role or geographic region – with extensive experience and expertise in oncology, cardiovascular, renal, metabolic, immunology, ophthalmology, rare disease, gene therapies, respiratory, weight management and neurology. Recruitment can be local, multi-country or fully global, delivered in the languages and cultural contexts appropriate to each market. Bespoke briefs – trial-experienced patients, treatment-naive cohorts, recently diagnosed individuals, paediatric caregivers, hard-to-reach communities, policymakers or key opinion leaders in highly specialised fields – are accommodated with frameworks designed to flex with the scope and ambition of each project.

  • Both. FIXING US offers fully turnkey recruitment that removes the burden from clients entirely – handling sourcing, screening, consent, scheduling, logistics, compensation and compliance from end to end – and adapts to whatever level of involvement clients prefer. Equally, where clients have existing patient panels, key opinion leader relationships, medical affairs networks, agencies or specialist recruitment partners, we work alongside them using frameworks that complement rather than duplicate internal capability. The structure can vary by team or workstream within a single client organisation, shaped around strategic needs, existing relationships, compliance constraints and the maturity of the brand’s stakeholder ecosystem.

  • FIXING US has built deep, longstanding networks of patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals (HCPs), key opinion leaders (KOLs), patient advocacy groups (PAGs), charities, payors and policymakers in health systems around the world. Recruitment is delivered through a combination of existing or bespoke proprietary databases, partnerships with patient organisations and clinical networks, professional society relationships, targeted outreach into specific patient communities and clinical specialties or in partnership with clients depending upon their capabilities, appetite and resources – sourcing and onboarding participants globally or locally to match each brief.

Working with us

  • Start with a conversation about your objectives – the audience you need to move, the opportunities and challenges you face, the change you need to make, the engagement and collaborations you need and seek, and the constraints you work within. From there, FIXING US typically moves through a brief discovery phase and swiftly delivers a tailored proposal covering approach, participants, compliance and measurement, then recruitment, production and delivery, with stakeholder engagement and diffusion – if this is desired or relevant for clients – planned from the outset rather than bolted on at the end. Use the contact page to begin, or explore the case studies first to see the approach applied in your therapy area and let us know if you need any assistance or have any queries.

  • Projects are scoped and priced to the brief – a single-market patient journey, a multi-country film series and a broadcast television season are very different undertakings – so we provide a tailored proposal rather than a rate card. We have a reputation for being able to adapt project design and deliverables to clients’ budgets and timelines as part of our focus towards being empowerers and problem-solvers, building meaningful and long-term relationships with our clients and partners.

  • Delivery timelines depend on the scope, scale and complexity of each project. As a general guide, from proposal approval to delivery, local market projects featuring patients or healthcare professionals can be delivered in as little as three weeks, and international projects featuring patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals from multiple jurisdictions in as little as five weeks. Larger-scale initiatives – such as television productions or complex multi-stakeholder programmes involving client teams, agencies and policymakers – may take several months from proposal to delivery. FIXING US shapes all delivery timelines around each client’s specific requirements.