Our founder was a patient first.
Our founder was diagnosed with stage three cancer. He went from rarely getting sick to sitting in appointments trying to understand chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs, how the treatments worked together, timelines, side effects, the medications for those side effects, and which warning signs actually mattered.
He barely understood a lot of it. Neither did his parents, who were being asked to absorb all of it while also processing what had just happened to their son. When something serious happens to your health, most of your attention goes to accepting it. Becoming an expert in your own condition at the same time is a lot to ask.
He often did not know what to ask, because he did not yet know enough to know what he was missing. And even when everything was explained clearly, remembering it later was its own problem. His mom became his scribe. She still has around a dozen notebooks of handwritten notes from those appointments, because somebody had to catch it all while the rest of the family was trying to keep up.
He is more than ten years in remission now and still sees more than a dozen specialists. The information lives across different doctors, health systems, portals, and telehealth visits. He is still trying to listen properly, take notes, work out what to ask, and hold onto all of it afterwards.
That is the problem we built Sidekick for. Not only for people managing something chronic, but for anyone who walks out of an appointment and realizes they caught about half of it.