Medicine was always at the table.
I’ve been fascinated by medicine for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I spent hours exploring anatomy programs on floppy disks (which definitely dates me), memorizing every bone in the human body before I was ten. While most kids had other hobbies, I was captivated by how the human body functions as one incredibly interconnected system.
Medicine was part of everyday life at home. My parents are a nurse and a vascular surgeon, so conversations about patients, diagnoses, and healthcare were common around our dinner table. One idea stuck with me: while the body works as a connected whole, healthcare often doesn’t. My dad’s work required him to think beyond a single organ system and consider how the entire body fit together. As I got older, I realized that way of thinking was the exception, not the rule.
Most of us move from specialist to specialist, appointment to appointment, and portal to portal. Each encounter captures only one piece of the story, while very few places bring the whole picture together.
Then I became a parent.
My husband and I welcomed three children in just three and a half years. Overnight, I was responsible for keeping track of everything: medications, fevers, symptoms, appointments, growth, allergies, questions for the pediatrician, and the subtle differences in how each child responded to the same illness. When one got sick, it often meant all three would soon follow — each with a different course and different needs.
As our family faced more complex medical challenges, that responsibility only grew. I watched loved ones navigate chronic illness and a years-long search for the right diagnosis, and I lived through my own journey with debilitating pain. It taught me firsthand how much work patients do just to be heard — tracking symptoms, collecting records, coordinating imaging, advocating with insurance, explaining months or years of suffering and hoping someone would help.
Over time I realized these weren’t isolated experiences. Friends raising children with chronic illnesses carried the same mental load. Families caring for aging parents struggled to keep everyone informed. The common thread wasn’t a diagnosis — it was the invisible work.
Your health story belongs to you.
Healthcare asks us to remember everything — every medication, diagnosis, symptom, test, and provider — and to reconstruct years of history from memory in the moments we’re most stressed. That never made sense to me. Our health information belongs to us. It shouldn’t live in disconnected portals or stay locked inside one hospital system; it should move with us throughout our lives.
That’s why I built Eider. Not to replace doctors or tell people what to do, but to give families ownership of their own health story — a place where medications, symptoms, growth, imaging, appointments, notes, and records finally live together, and where the day-to-day work of caring for someone you love becomes just a little lighter.
