Why I'm building a health record for pets

Pet owners carry their animal's health in their head.

Vaccination dates. Last weight at the vet. When the cough started. Which food caused the flare-up. The name of that anti-parasitic the previous vet recommended. When something goes wrong, that memory — plus a stack of crumpled receipts — is the only record.

There's no equivalent of a personal health record for pets. Humans have had EHRs for two decades. For animals, we're still living in 1995.

I'm building CheckPaw to fix that for one specific case first: my own pets. The MVP is simple. One owner-controlled timeline per animal. You log:

• Symptoms and the things that worried you (with photos)

• Vaccinations and meds with reminders

• A daily wellness pulse — energy, appetite, sleep, social — that takes 10 seconds and slowly reveals patterns most owners would never spot

• Vet visits and what was said

That's it for now. No clinic integrations yet. No insurance, no AI symptom checker. Just a clean, persistent record that doesn't live in your camera roll and three different group chats.

The interesting part for me is the daily pulse. Once you have 60+ days of energy/appetite/sleep/social scores, a chronic decline shows up long before the owner would have called it. That's the wedge.

The thing I'm wrestling with right now: making the daily check-in feel like ten seconds, not ten questions. Right now it's four sliders. I want it to be one swipe, one tap, and an optional "anything weird today?" note. If it doesn't fit between feeding the cat and brushing your teeth, it dies — and then all the downstream pattern-spotting dies with it.

Follow along if you care about pets, EHRs, or the unsexy work of getting people to log things every day.