Right2Hope — Patient access & matching

When standard treatment stops working, what’s left is a maze: clinical trials, expanded access, compassionate use, Right-to-Try. The programs exist. Finding them — while you’re sick, scared, and short on time — is another story.

Right2Hope is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built to make that maze navigable, for patients and for the physicians trying to help them. We built the platform with them — a two-person Startrise team, one deep in the code, one holding product, design, and delivery together. And when it launched, we didn’t hand over the keys and leave. We stayed to help it grow.

One problem, three very different people

Patients land here during some of the worst weeks of their lives. They need clarity, not jargon. Physicians want to help but can’t spend an afternoon decoding one program’s eligibility rules. And the biotech companies running these access programs are bound by strict compliance rules and genuinely struggle to find the right candidates.

Before Right2Hope, connecting these three meant phone calls, PDFs, and luck. Windows closed while paperwork moved.

We drew the maze first

No screens until the flows made sense. We mapped the full journey for four actors — patient, doctor, biotech sponsor, and the platform’s own team — including all the unglamorous parts: registration dead-ends, eligibility questions, application states, hand-offs between roles.

The research map — four actors, every path, every dead-end

Boxes before beauty

With the flows agreed, we wireframed the working core: a doctor finds a program for a specific patient, applies on their behalf, trades files with the sponsor, and tracks monitoring records over time. Grey boxes, real decisions.

Doctor-side flows in low fidelity — apply, exchange files, monitor

The clinician portal earned its shape through repetition. Patient lists, program search with medical filters, monitoring records and forms — version after version, each one a little less clever and a little more obvious.

Portal iterations — patients, programs, search, monitoring records

Finding the face

Here’s the design problem in one sentence: a platform about experimental treatment can’t look cold, and it can’t overpromise. Clinical-and-sterile scares people off; hopeful-and-glossy is worse. We put seven art directions on the wall and argued about them properly.

Seven directions on the wall — from botanical to brutalist

The winner: soft aurora gradients over calm, disciplined typography. Warm without promising anything medicine can’t.

The gradient system — one language, tuned per audience

Patients, sponsors, and physicians each got their own front door, built from the same system but speaking directly to them.

Three entry points, one design language

The sponsor page, top to bottom — program management, ranking, real-world data

What shipped

• Program search and a directory spanning managed access, expanded access, compassionate use, and Right-to-Try pathways
• Sponsor and program pages with structured medical data
• Patient and clinician portals with application and monitoring workflows
• A custom ranking system that surfaces the patients each program can actually help, by medical need and eligibility
• HIPAA-aligned flows on AWS

MVP in 4 weeks. Full launch in 8. Then clinics started onboarding — and the work changed shape.

Launch was the halfway point

A platform nobody finds helps nobody. So the second act was building Right2Hope’s growth engine:

• Patient acquisition — Google Ad Grants campaigns threaded through the tight restrictions on medical advertising, pointing people at the program directory, or at a genuinely useful article when that served them better
• SEO and content — a SurferSEO-centered workflow from topic selection through QA, plus programmatic SEO across program pages: structured medical schema, internal linking, search-intent coverage
• A voice worth trusting — calm, practical, medically responsible; realistic timelines, honest uncertainty, always a clear next step
• Real measurement — GA4 and Search Console with conversion tracking, so decisions about ads, pages, and content run on data instead of gut feel
• Keeping it all moving — coordinating leadership, engineering, design, content, and social into one rhythm, including sourcing a fractional marketing lead for the team

Where it stands

Right2Hope runs today as a public platform with continuous patient-match intake. We’re still at it: wiring the blog into a cloud CMS so publishing gets faster, scaling the programmatic SEO and authority work, sharpening conversion reporting, and growing the AI-assisted discovery layer underneath it all.

Technical stack

• Frontend: Next.js with TypeScript
• Backend: Node.js with Express
• Database: PostgreSQL
• AI/ML: Custom ranking algorithms
• APIs: Clinical Trials API integration
• Infrastructure: AWS (HIPAA-compliant)
• Design: Figma — research, wireframes, design system
• Growth: Google Ad Grants, GA4, Search Console, SurferSEO