The honest version, at full length
The short version
I'm Ryan Hall. I live in Milton, Georgia, and I build small software businesses for a living: local directories, service tools, the unglamorous kind of software that does one job well for a specific group of people. My family lives with stage IV colorectal cancer, which means I also live inside the online communities where patients and caregivers compare notes at two in the morning.
TrialWorkbench exists because of something I kept watching happen in those communities: when someone needs a clinical trial, the search is so confusing that experienced patients volunteer hours of their own time to walk newcomers through it by hand. The tools failed, so people became the tools.
Why the professionals, and not another patient app
There are patient-facing trial matchers, some well funded. I don't think the world needs another one from me. What I noticed instead is that the people who do this work professionally, independent patient advocates and oncology navigators, have no dedicated tools at all. The professional associations publish tracking spreadsheets. Advocates sell hand-built annotated trial searches that take one to two business days each. Meanwhile the registry data these searches depend on is famously out of date: in my first test pull, one "recruiting" study had all eight of its nearby sites individually suspended.
So the thesis is narrow and specific: give the professionals a workbench. Profile in, matched and explained shortlist out, site enrollment status verified by an actual phone call, and a client-ready report that carries the advocate's name, not mine. You can see a full sample of that report here, generated from live registry data.
Where this actually stands
I would rather tell you plainly than let a polished page imply otherwise: as of late July 2026, TrialWorkbench is a working analysis pipeline, a sample report, and a design partnership offer. It is not a finished product. The finished product gets built with, and only with, a founding cohort of working advocates who tell me what the real job needs. If nobody who does this work wants it, I will not build it, and I will say so on this page.
The promises
- No pharma money during design. While the founding cohort shapes this tool, its only revenue is founding members. Nobody's recruitment budget gets a vote.
- No patient-identifying data. The workbench operates on clinical profiles: diagnosis, biomarkers, prior lines, location radius. Names and identities stay with the professional, where they belong. More in the privacy note.
- Never medical advice. This is an informational instrument for professionals. Treatment decisions belong to patients and their care teams, full stop.
- The community is not a funnel. The patient communities I'm part of are where I learned the problem exists. They are not a marketing channel, and they never will be.
Talk to me
If you search trials for clients, I want your fingerprints on this before I write the product code. Founding members get locked pricing for life, a direct line to me, and a roadmap they steer. And if you just want to tell me why this will not work, that email is worth as much as any yes.