From Stress to Scalability

Real Patients was born from the frustrations of its founders, Ronnie Sharpe and Jen Horonjeff. Tired of healthcare companies designing products and services without patient input, they set out with a mission to empower patients to leverage their experiences to drive positive change.

Just a few years later, the company had become a leading provider of qualitative patient insights, helping teams at AstraZeneca, Bayer, and the American Medical Association build better patient-centric experiences.

Delivering project-based qualitative research services meant recruiting diverse patient populations, verifying backgrounds, coordinating research sessions, and compensating participants.

As they expanded, recruiting patients, processing applications, and paying participants turned into a juggling act across disconnected software tools, email templates, and static spreadsheets.

The team's search led them to Salesforce. They were told a custom implementation would fit their needs, signed a 3-year contract, and started with consultants.

After months of collaboration, two things became obvious:

• Neither Salesforce nor its app ecosystem could fully support Real Patients' unique needs.
• The consultants still didn't understand how the business actually operated.

It became a costly misstep in both time and money—without ever reaching production.

We believe in two simple things:

• Your time should be spent on what you're good at—not getting buried in technical weeds unless you want to.
• Long build and scoping cycles don't make anyone happy.

Instead of a long discovery phase, we quickly align on the minimum lovable improvement that moves the business forward.

What It Looked Like in Practice

• Shared context in the formats their team already used (spreadsheets, systems access, screen shares)
• Targeted follow-up questions instead of exhaustive workshops
• Built deep understanding of compliance needs and workflows
• Shipped the first production platform in one quarter of the time of their prior Salesforce attempt
• Continued with weekly updates driven by direct feedback

Launching the Ask Patients Platform (APP) saved team members dozens of hours on project management every week.

Key Features

• Bespoke project management views with a birds-eye perspective of active projects and participants
• Specialized tools for global payments, patient communications, and compliance documents
• Robust security improvements and seamless data migration systems

With the operational foundation in place, the partnership evolved. Rarely Decaf became more than a delivery team—we became a strategic partner helping Real Patients shape what comes next.

Together, we've continued redesigning products and services for an AI-first future while preserving the speed of innovation they need to stay ahead in a fast-changing healthcare landscape.