The Blank Slate Problem
In 2016, I started experiencing a series of severe health events that landed me in the ER several times, eventually led to an MCAS diagnosis and a long path of rebuilding my health.
It taught me a lot about how healthcare actually works — and how much of the burden of continuity falls on the patient. Every new provider. Every urgent care visit. Every appointment with someone who doesn’t have your history. You start from scratch. You try to recall everything accurately under stress or just when asked, in a room that doesn’t feel like yours, out of sorts, with someone you’ve never met and often forget a detail or two.
No one has the full picture. And you’re the only one trying to hold it together.
This is the blank slate problem. And almost every patient I’ve ever spoken to knows exactly what I mean.
During the pandemic, I made a simple medical care summary available as a free download. I wasn’t thinking about a company — just hoping it might help someone else navigate care during a strange and difficult time.
I was surprised and genuinely moved to discover that around 250 people had used it.
I kept using it myself too — at doctor and dental appointments, when helping my cousin from the UK navigate a few care visits here. Every care team said the same thing: it helped them see the full picture quickly, without missing medications or details. No more starting from scratch. Genuinely useful for both patients and providers.
That stayed with me.
The problem is structural, not personal.
When things go wrong — health emergencies, caregiving, housing problems, paperwork, everyday life admin — everything scatters. Notes live in different apps. Documents end up half-lost. Important details exist somewhere in your head until you need them under stress, and then they’re suddenly hard to find or a challenging frustration.
Even figuring out where something is stored and making sure you have all the documents, insurance and details you need can become its own crisis.
Healthcare systems are evolving. Standards like FHIR are helping providers and systems exchange data more effectively — that’s important progress. But interoperability between systems is not the same as clarity or control for people. Most patients are still logging into multiple portals, re-explaining their history at every visit, and piecing together their own continuity in the gaps between systems.
What’s missing is a patient-held layer. A privacy-first way for people to organize, control, and intentionally share their own care and life information — across providers, systems, and life transitions, at their own discretion.
Not a replacement for healthcare systems. Something that works alongside them, in real life.
We don’t need another app, yet.
So I started building something more complete. Something steadier.
It began with the care summary that had already helped 250 people — and grew from there. A better emergency card you can print, laminate, and keep duplicates of wherever you need them: your wallet, your bag, your car, your emergency kit, your caregiver’s hands and perhaps some trusted folks. Offline PDFs, because real life is still anchored in paper especially in moments of care. A private digital layer using Joplin — open-source, end-to-end encrypted, offline-capable — with pre-built vault templates so the structure is already there when you are.
The result is Gage.care — a private Care Vault System.
The core system holds your essential health and life information: emergency medical card, care summary, medication and provider log, caregiver handoff template, travel continuity sheet, home and household guide, and a legal document locator. One-time purchase. Private, offline, yours forever.
The Family Vault extends the system to every household member — a complete record for each adult and child, shared emergency contacts, household medication log, and vaccination log books designed to grow year by year.
The Pet Care Vault covers everything your vet, pet sitter, and emergency caregiver needs — including a running vaccination log with batch numbers.
The Caregiver Handoff Kit is a structured briefing for anyone stepping in — at hospital discharge, during respite care, or when a new support worker starts.
The Estate & End-of-Life Vault holds what the people who love you will need — will location, financial accounts, digital life, final wishes, and a plain-language first-72-hours guide written for whoever has to handle things. An act of care, completed in advance.
No app. No account. No subscription. No data stored anywhere but with you. The format — printed, digital, encrypted, or all three — is entirely yours to choose.
Start here — free:
The Care Vault Starter Kit is pay-what-you-want — and free is genuinely, always an option. It includes your emergency medical card and one-page care summary. Print them. Laminate them. Keep duplicates in your wallet, your car, your go-bag, your caregiver’s folder. Share them with the people who might need to speak for you.
Even just those two pages — done — makes a real difference.
Who this is for.
Everyone, eventually. But most immediately:
People navigating chronic illness or complex conditions — who arrive at every appointment carrying a history that providers don’t have, and leave carrying the gaps between what was said and what was understood.
Caregivers — who hold an enormous amount of information in their heads about someone else’s life and care, and deserve a structure that holds it with them.
Families with children or elderly parents — who are managing multiple people’s health histories, school requirements, and care needs simultaneously.
Anyone who has ever had an emergency — and realized in that moment that no one around them knew what medications they were on and what any life threatening allergies they have.
People navigating housing instability, displacement, or difficult transitions — for whom portable, private records aren’t a convenience but a lifeline.
The people who would benefit most from organized care information are often the last to have access to it. That’s the gap this is designed to close.
We’re offering care access pricing for people navigating chronic illness, cancer treatment, caregiving, grief, hardship, or displacement. And we’ve started quietly sharing copies through a small pay-it-forward effort — because preparedness shouldn’t be a privilege.
If cost is any kind of barrier for you or someone you know, please reach out. We’ll make sure you can access it.
What we’re building toward.
The vault suite is the foundation. What we’re building on top of it next:
A Care Navigator — an AI companion that works privately from your vault to help you understand your options, prepare for appointments, and navigate next steps. Privacy-first by design.”
Provider matching — integrative-inclusive, consent-based matching to practitioners who have experience with your conditions. Built to surface TCM, naturopathy, somatic therapy, and community health alongside conventional medicine — because the people who need complex care are often the ones currently navigating the most fragmented systems.
Care affordability tools — cost transparency before you commit, medical bill review, and eventually fair-rate financing for medical costs. The infrastructure of care access, not just the information layer.
Longer term, we’re developing privacy-first integrations alongside evolving standards like FHIR — so that people who want to connect their vault to clinical systems can do so on their own terms.
It’s still early. The vault is the start. But the direction is clear.
A year ago I told a few folks that I was going to tackle this. I wasn’t sure exactly how. I just knew the problem was real, the gap was real, and that the people experiencing it deserved something built with genuine care rather than extracted from their data.
From a patient’s perspective, this is a start.
The Care Vault Starter Kit — emergency card + care summary — is free. Always.
Download it. Fill it in. Print copies. Share it with someone who needs it.
The complete system, family and pet vaults, caregiver kit, and estate vault are available at gage.care/get-started.
FOUNDING30–30% off everything until June 30.
I’d genuinely love to hear what you think — and what you’d want to see built next.
CEO & Founder, Gage.Care