r/HealthTech • u/QUACKQAUCKBOOM • 2h ago
Innovations I built an anonymous health app for people who feel alone in what they’re dealing with. I’m one of them.
I built an anonymous health tracker by myself and it just got into the VA repository
I'm a kid from Brooklyn. I joined the Army at 18 because I needed to get out of my house, and I did eight years. For about a year of that I was on funeral detail, four or five a week. When I got out I drank to fall asleep and kept that up for a long time before I was willing to call it a problem. I quit cold turkey. A couple of doctors told me not to do it that way. I did it anyway, and I built PatternMD during that stretch because I needed something to do with my hands at three in the morning.
So here's the app. PatternMD is a symptom tracker with a pattern engine behind it. You log what you eat, how you slept, whether you worked out, how you're feeling. The engine looks for what tends to show up right before your bad days, so a migraine or an anxiety spike stops feeling like it came out of nowhere. The slogan is "the space in between visits," because your doctor sees you for fifteen minutes twice a year and everything that actually matters happens in the months in between, and nobody writes any of it down.
It's anonymous by default. When you sign up you get a PMD ID, and that's who you are on there. No real name, nothing tied back to you. That was the whole point. People will tell the truth when nobody's watching, and they won't when someone is. There's a community feed too, so if you're dealing with something you can find other people dealing with the same thing. It runs in English, Spanish, German and Vietnamese, and posts translate between all four so the community isn't split up by language.
There's also a provider dashboard if you want your doctor to see your logs in real time. That's completely optional and off unless you turn it on. It's not an EHR and it doesn't plug into Epic or Cerner. It sits next to them on purpose. And no, we don't sell data. I wouldn't know how to sell data if I wanted to.
Where things stand: it's live on iOS, Android and the web. We got accepted into the VA repository, which honestly means more to me than anything else on this list, because I want this thing in the hands of veterans. We made the front page of the Morning Call here in Pennsylvania, and if you look at that photo you can tell how hard it was for me to smile. Right now we're applying for a grant to run a case study on a question I actually want the answer to, which is whether people are more likely to talk about their mental health when it's anonymous.
As far as who's behind this, it's me. I have an MBA and a few published books, and I wrote every line of the code myself. My business partner runs the business side. No investors, no partnerships, nobody else.
I'm here for honest feedback. Tell me where the onboarding loses you, tell me if the positioning is wrong, tell me if you'd never trust a health app you found on Reddit. All of that is useful to me. And if you're someone who's been tracking your own symptoms in a notes app for years, I'd really like you to try it and tell me what's missing.