We built Sidekick, a Mac and Windows app that joins your telehealth visit in real time. It explains medical terms and suggests questions worth asking, including the ones you may not think to ask. Afterward, your visit highlights and next steps are all in one place, so you can stay focused on the conversation instead of taking notes.

A lot of why we care about this comes from our own experiences with healthcare. Our founder, Rahul, had stage three cancer at 17. His mom basically became his note taker through treatment and still has about a dozen notebooks from his appointments. More than 10 years later, he’s in remission but still sees a lot of specialists and runs into the same problem: trying to listen, understand what’s being said, figure out what to ask, and remember what he’s supposed to do afterward.

Other people on our team have run into the same thing from very different angles. One became a caregiver after his dad had a severe stroke and found himself taking notes, looking up terms, and trying to keep track of what every doctor said. Others have dealt with things like pancreatitis and other serious health issues across very different ages and stages of life.

That got us interested in a simple question: how much of that work can actually be taken off the patient or caregiver?

A lot of products around medical conversations focus on recording or summarizing the visit afterward. That’s useful, but we kept coming back to the fact that a lot of the confusion happens while the conversation is still happening. If you can catch something in the moment, you can ask about it while your doctor is still there and potentially change what happens next. Realizing it after the visit can mean messages, phone calls, or another appointment just to get back to the same conversation (and in SF I often can't get another doctor visit till 2 months later).

What we’ve been testing is whether it’s actually helpful to support the patient in the moment, especially around terminology and questions, without becoming another thing competing for your attention.

If you want to try it, you can download at our site. Sidekick is desktop-only for now. I’d be especially interested in thoughts on the live part of the experience.

We're building a mobile app for in-person visits next. What are your thoughts on the balance between live help vs after-visit? Would something pre-visit be more helpful?