Why I built VitalRecord
I have congenital nystagmus. My eyes have moved on their own since before I can remember, text slides when I read, and no pair of glasses has ever lifted the ceiling on my vision. There is no cure. The treatments that exist were mostly found by accident.
I run an automated trading fund. The work is turning large, messy datasets into something structured enough to act on. One weekend I pointed the same tooling at my own condition, because I wanted to know what the medical literature actually said, not what the one paragraph on a patient information sheet said.
It turned into something longer. I pulled 3,200 papers on nystagmus, read 1,404 of them one by one into a structured table, and tied every finding to the exact quote it came from. I kept the failures in, not just the wins. It surfaced cheap, off-patent drugs that had worked in one place and were never carried across to the people they might help. I wrote it up for others living with the condition.
Then a friend, in the middle of treatment for a serious illness, told me she felt her doctors had run out of things to try. Not long after, she was handed a consent form for an experimental drug and asked to decide from thirty-nine pages that named the drug only by a code. I could have done the same dig for her once, by hand. Instead I built it so anyone can.
That is what VitalRecord is. It reads the records you already have in plain language, searches them together with the published research, traces every line back to its source, and explains what they mean, including what they point to. This exists so you can use your practitioner's time well.
Alex Kovaceski, founder