Where Patients Shape the Future of Health Innovation

Health tech and biotech innovators are under pressure to be more patient-centric but bridging that gap takes more than surveys or advisory boards. The Merakoi Patient Experience Lab (PEL) is a structured, on-demand engagement platform where vetted patient experts become your strategic partners across the product lifecycle.
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How it works

Curated Expert Panels
Access over 3,000 trained patient experts across 40+ disease areas, handpicked to match your goals.

Every PEL engagement includes:

A Merakoi engagement manager and patient UX strategist
Project moderation, insight synthesis, and reporting
Compliance and legal oversight, including FMV-based contracting and NDAs

Flexible Engagement Models
Start with a minimum 3-month engagement or build a longer-term partnership. Extend PELs across indications or geographies as your pipeline grows.

Collect insights

Gather Insights

Quickly understand real patient pain points, motivators, and lived experiences.
Patient journey mapping
Concept validation and feedback loops
Persona development
Digital ethnographies and experience audits

Co-design solutions

Co-Design Solutions

Work shoulder-to-shoulder with patient experts to build, test, and refine innovations.
Ideation workshops and sprint facilitation
Usability testing
Prototype development
Value proposition framing

Create content

Create Patient-Led Content

Develop empathetic, accurate, and compelling materials grounded in patient reality.
Lay language validation
Patient storytelling and media creation
Support toolkits
Campaign assets
View case studies

Why Choose Merakoi’s Patient Experience Lab?

Speed with Substance

Access valuable insights from patient experts in your disease and therapeutic area in weeks, not months. Focus fast on what matters most.

Actionable Outputs:

rom prototype testing to persona development and communication refinement, every session drives tangible next steps

Outperform competitors

Navigate a world of increasing choice and complexity for patients, HCPs, and payers with rich input from high-quality, vetted patient experts.

Real-World Relevance

Move beyond theoretical frameworks—test assumptions and co-design with people living the reality.

Scalable & Flexible:

Use the PEL to support one product or scale across your portfolio with panels tailored by disease, geography, and business need.

How do PEPs work?

You can create PEPs on-demand from our community of more than 800 patient experts in 100+ diseases and conditions, or we have pre-built PEPs covering 40+ disease areas:

Oncology

  • Breast Cancer 
  • Lung Cancer 
  • Colorectal Cancer
  • Urological Cancers
  • Blood Cancers 
  • Lymphomas 
  • Ovarian Cancer
  • Melanoma
  • Pancreatic Cancer
  • Prostate Cancer
  • Rare Cancers - oncogenetic and subtypes (incl. ALK+, ROS1, RET, NTRK, EGFR, TNBC, HER2+, BRAC)

Neurology

  • Multiple Sclerosis
  • Parkinson's Disease
  • Epilepsy

Autoimmune

  • Atopic Dermatitis 
  • Eczema 
  • Psoriasis
  • Rheumatoid Arthritis 
  • Psoriatic Arthritis 
  • Alopecia 
  • Lupus

Cardiovascular

  • Chronic Heart Failure 
  • Hypertension 
  • Stroke
  • Aortic Stenosis
  • Peripheral arterial disease (PAD)
  • Coronary artery disease (CAD)

Endocrine

  • Diabetes Type 2
  • Obesity 
  • NASH

Gastrointestinal

  • Crohn's Disease
  • Ulcerative Colitis 
  • Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome

Mental Health

  • Depression
  • Major Depressive Disorder

Rare Diseases

  • Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH)
  • Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria (PNH)
  • Myasthenia Gravis (MG)
  • Sickle Cell / Beta Thalassemia
  • Haemophilia
  • Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA)
  • Cystic fibrosis

Respiratory

  • COPD
  • Asthma 
  • Long Covid

Ophthalmology

  • Diabetic Macular Edema (DME)
  • Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD)
  • Vision Impairment and blindness

Cross-Disease

  • Self-Injectables incl. IBD, MS, AD, PsO, RA
  • Mental Health 
  • Chronic Pain
  • Chronic Insomnia
Don’t see what you’re looking for?
 Contact us for more information about our disease area coverage.
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Frequently asked questions

For more pricing information, contact us.
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How do Patient Experience Panels work?
Patient Experience Panels are like a supercharged advisory board, so they can help with whatever’s relevant and useful to your organisation right now, across the product lifecycle. As well as a curated panel of patient experts, you also get:

- Dedicated account manager & patient UX designer
- Project facilitation, moderation of interviews & sessions
- Access to collaborative insights and user experience toolkit
- Contracting and reimbursement of PEP patient experts

We have existing PEP coverage over 11 disease areas and we check feasibility of additional disease areas on request, within two weeks.
How do you select patient experts for each PEP?
We select relevant consultants from our global network of over 400 vetted patient experts, matched according to your business goals and therapeutic area. You can think of your PEP as an advisory board with a uniquely informed perspective relevant to your needs.
How long do PEPs run?
You engage a PEP for a minimum of three months, to build a productive collaboration around your business goals. You can also extend PEPs indefinitely to match your longer-term objectives and integrate patient perspectives into the core of your business.
Are PEPs anonymous?
Unlike traditional market research or focus groups, patient experts on PEPs share their personal information with you. This creates a more interactive, collaborative relationship, which is essential for truly understanding patient perspectives and co-creating solutions to address these needs.
How many patient experts are in each PEP?
Depending on your unique situation, 3, 6, or 9. We’ve found the capacity for personal interaction decreases above nine, which is where the huge value of PEPs lies.

If you have complex business challenges or multiple projects, we recommend spinning up another PEP to focus on specific challenges, rather than adding more experts to a single PEP.
Can I discuss confidential information with my PEP?
All merakoi patient experts and specialists on a PEP are covered by professional consultancy agreements with non-disclosure terms, so yes, you most certainly can — and are encouraged — to share confidential information.
How do you manage compliance when working with patient experts in a PEP?
Patient experts are consultants with high standards of confidentiality when working on projects. merakoi ensure all legal and regulatory standards are upheld, including the non-promotional nature of work (no inducements to promote or use a medical product) and the safety and adverse event reporting of medicinal products.
Who contracts the patient experts in the PEP?
After our rigorous screening process, merakoi contracts patient experts as consultants, applying fair market value fees in line with local regulations. Patient experts are paid directly via merakoi.
Who owns the outputs of work created by a PEP?
Typically you own the rights to anything created by the PEP working on your behalf. in some cases, it’s in everyone’s best interests for content to be joint-owned between you and the patient expert, empowering the patient expert to leverage their community reach by sharing freely.

Patient experts and merakoi retain rights to any prior inventions that happened outside of the PEP.

How do you pay the patient experts in the PEP?
You pay merakoi a subscription fee and merakoi handles the contracting fees and honorarium directly with patient experts according to fair market value standards, so you can focus on your business challenges.
What do PEPs cost?
PEPs are provided via a convenient credit-based subscription over a minimum three-month period.

You purchase credits when you set-up your merakoi account and apply them to activities on any of your projects as you need, so you can access your PEP instantly whenever you need support.
Not seeing your question answered here?
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Book a consultation to talk to us about collaborating with patient experts on your project.

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