How it started
I built the tool I wished I'd had — something that could hold my whole story, and actually make sense of it
For years I dealt with declining health — and I learned firsthand how hard it is to get doctors to see the whole picture.
Long waitlists between appointments. A dozen specialists, each holding one part of the story. Hundreds of pages of records scattered across portals that didn't talk to each other. And then, once I finally got into the room, 15 minutes with the provider was never enough time for the doctor to understand years of history and piece it together. It started to feel like doctors didn't want the complicated cases — and there's no incentive to take them on, so why would they?
The hardest part wasn't any single visit. It was that I was the only one connecting everything together — the only one fighting for myself. Every new doctor started from zero, so I re-explained it over and over. When you're already exhausted and unwell, being your own medical advocate is a second full-time job you never applied for. Where's the help?
I kept coming back to the same idea: it shouldn't start over at every appointment. It should start with the patient — walking in with years of history organized, ready for my next steps, already knowing what to ask.
So I built it for myself. That became Captain: an AI that can read across the records, labs, and visit notes I add — not just what I paste into a chat — and then does the thing nobody was doing for me. It connects them. Recorded visits can be transcribed and read alongside the documents and results I've been handed, so what was said out loud in those rooms is written down now, not something I had to remember.
That's the part I could never do alone. Captain gives me theories worth exploring and helps surface what may still be unexplained — a missing test, a dropped thread, the question I should be asking next. It does what I always wished someone would do: read across the material I have, and think about it with me. None of it is a diagnosis — it's the thinking I'd do myself, if I had the time and the memory to hold ten years at once.
Then it comes with me. Before a visit it drafts the prep — my history, what's changed, what to raise — in an organized document a doctor can review with me. I record the appointment, and afterward Captain pulls out what was said and what I'm meant to do next, so a rushed fifteen minutes doesn't evaporate on the drive home.
It has genuinely helped me, and I hope it helps you. If you've been carrying your own case for years, I think you'll recognize the feeling I was trying to fix. I'm only getting started — there's a long list of things I still want to build, and I'd love for you to come along.