Medicestry

Context

Medicestry lets a family record, visualise and pass down its medical history. You capture health events, diagnoses and milestones, map them onto an interactive family tree, and share a structured summary with relatives or a doctor.

The company's stated mission centres underserved communities, where generational health history is most often lost and preventive care gaps are widest.

The problem

Almost everyone has sat in a doctor's office and guessed at the answer to “does this run in your family?” That information exists — it is in a grandmother's memory, an aunt's recollection, a diagnosis nobody wrote down — and it disappears one funeral at a time.

It is also the single cheapest input into preventive care. The problem is not medical, it is a data-capture problem wearing a medical coat: how do you get a family to record something that only pays off decades later?

What I built

• Built the interactive family tree builder — mapping relationships, attaching health conditions to individual members, and updating as new information arrives
• Implemented an interactive health timeline for events, diagnoses and milestones
• Built sharing and export: structured health summaries sent to doctors or caregivers, PDF and digital chart export, and per-person view/edit permissions
• Implemented preventative screening alerts tied to age milestones, for example mammogram and colonoscopy reminders at the relevant ages
• Integrated encrypted, HIPAA-conscious storage so sensitive records stay protected while remaining easy to reach

Engineering challenges

A family tree is a graph, not a tree. Real families have step-parents, half-siblings, adoption and remarriage. A naive parent-child hierarchy breaks on the second real user. Rendering that graph legibly on a phone screen, and letting someone edit it with a thumb, is the core UI problem in the product.

Sensitive data raises the floor. Health records mean encryption, careful permission boundaries, and being deliberate about what leaves the device. Every sharing feature had to start from “who can see this, exactly” rather than adding permissions afterwards.

Export that a doctor will actually read. A PDF of a family health history is only useful if it is scannable in the thirty seconds a physician has. That is a typography and information-hierarchy problem as much as a rendering one.

Outcome

Medicestry is live on the App Store and Google Play.