I build patient facing software, and the things that have to sit behind it.

Investigate Health Publishing is the company. The work is to put people in charge of their own health information: to help them hold it, decide who sees it, and carry it into whatever health technology arrives next.

What I am building

• Ethia

  For people living with an autoimmune condition. Their labs, medications, appointments and how they have actually been feeling sit in one place that belongs to them, and it remembers the detail nobody can be expected to hold onto between visits.

• PathwayBio

  Research teams spend months looking for the patients they need, and patients who would gladly take part never hear about the work. PathwayBio sits between the two, and nobody is contacted who has not agreed to be.

• Accord

  For two people who have to keep talking when it is difficult. It sits with what you want to say before you send it, and leaves the decision to you.

Why

I spent twelve years trying to get a straight answer out of the healthcare system. It started as vertigo in 2010 and became something I organised my life around.

I learned to read my own labs because nobody would explain them to me. I kept spreadsheets of my symptoms because I would forget what to tell the doctor. I walked into fifteen minute appointments with no idea what to ask, and walked out knowing I had wasted them. For years I was told it was anxiety.

The answer, when it came, took one appointment with the right person asking the right question. Nothing about the system had changed. I had simply reached someone who looked. What stayed with me is how much of it rested on me: on what I had written down, what I could remember, and whether I could say it clearly in the few minutes I had. That part is what software can carry, and it is what I have been building since.

The years

• 2010
  Vertigo and dizziness start. What I expect to be one appointment becomes the beginning of twelve years.
• 2012 to 2018
  Thirty or so doctors across fourteen specialties. Seven MRIs, blood work I lost count of, and the repeated suggestion that it was anxiety.
• 2019
  I start writing down what keeps going wrong. Specialists who cannot see each other's notes. Protocols that have not moved in years. Nobody whose job it is to help a patient navigate any of it.
• 2020
  The cause turns out to be a concussion from years earlier that nobody had evaluated properly. One appointment, with the right tests, after more than thirty attempts.
• 2021 to 2024
  I publish the guides I wish someone had handed me, and a patient audience grows around them.
• 2025 onward
  Investigate Health Publishing, and the software above.

The books and guides

Before any of the software there were the guides, and they are still there. They came out of doing this myself: how to get tested properly, how to use an appointment you only get fifteen minutes of, what to carry into an emergency room, and what the dizziness actually was.

One of them is free and the rest are a few dollars. They are the reason I know this problem from the inside rather than from a product meeting.

Read the guides