The most valuable app on my phone

Most families keep their medical history in three places at once: a folder at home, a phone gallery and a WhatsApp thread. NouxMe is our attempt to replace all three with one record that a family can actually read.

We built it for a specific person: the son or daughter who looks after a parent's health, often from another city or another country. In India, that person is becoming more common every year, and the paperwork they manage keeps growing. Below, we set out the problem in numbers, what NouxMe does about it, and what it deliberately does not do.

Why we built it

NouxMe started with a plastic bag. When my grandmother needed surgery, every scan, report and prescription she had ever been given sat in one bag on the table, in no particular order. The operation was performed by a robot, with a precision no human hand can match. Getting her into that operating room took a week of phone calls and four of us acting as a filing system.

The medicine was never the hard part. Finding, reading and carrying the records was. Most families have a version of that bag, and very few have a better way to manage it.

Records are digital, but scattered

Digital at scale. India has digitised health records faster than almost any country. More than 104 crore records are now linked to over 93 crore ABHA health accounts, according to PIB.

Scattered by design. There is no central server holding those records. Each one stays with the hospital or lab that created it, and is shared only with the patient's consent. That is good for privacy, but it leaves the work of collecting and reading reports with families.

In practice, one report sits in a phone gallery, another in a WhatsApp thread, and another on a lab portal that nobody remembers the password for. The rest stay in a folder at home.

More parents, further away

More parents. India had 149 million people aged 60 and over in 2022. UNFPA projects 347 million by 2050, about one in five Indians.

More conditions. In LASI, India's largest survey of older adults, 32% of people over 60 had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, 18.8% with a bone or joint disease and 14.2% with diabetes. Chronic conditions mean repeat tests, so the pile of reports grows every year.

Further away. 5.7% of Indians over 60 already live alone, and many of their children have moved. In June 2025, people born in India became Australia's largest overseas-born group for the first time, according to the ABS. For many of these families, a parent's blood report arrives as a Sunday phone call: the value, the unit and the small H in the margin, written down and compared from memory.

What NouxMe does

NouxMe takes over four jobs that families currently do by hand.

• Keep. Take a photo of a report or upload the PDF the lab sends. Blood tests, scans, prescriptions and discharge summaries all go into one record, along with bills and insurance papers.
• Read. Every report gets a plain-language summary that explains what was tested and what the report says.
• Compare. The trends view lines up the same test across every report, so a family sees the direction of a result, not just today's number.
• Share. The complete record can be sent to a doctor in place of a stack of loose pages.

Every summary is written twice: once in plain language for the family, and once in clinical language for the doctor.

A worked example. Suppose a father's HbA1c is 7.1% in March and 7.4% in September, measured by two labs with different report layouts. On paper, those are two sheets that rarely end up side by side. In NouxMe they appear as one line on one chart, moving up. NouxMe does not interpret that change. It makes sure the family sees it, and knows to ask the doctor about it.

The same record can be opened by a parent in Noida and their child in Melbourne, so both are looking at the same summary and the same trend. The weekly phone call stops being a dictation and becomes a conversation about what to ask at the next appointment.

What a lost report costs

Families still carry a large share. Government spending rose from 29% of India's total health expenditure in 2014-15 to 48% in 2021-22, and out-of-pocket spending fell from 62.6% to 39.4%, according to the National Health Accounts. That is real progress. It still means families pay almost 40 paise of every health rupee.

When last year's report cannot be found, the simplest fix is often to repeat the test. The family pays twice: once at the lab counter, and once in another morning spent getting a parent there. NouxMe is built so the report can be found.

What NouxMe does not do

NouxMe explains and organises records. It does not diagnose, predict or recommend treatment, and it is not designed for emergencies.

We drew this line deliberately. Explaining what a report says is useful to almost everyone. Deciding what it means for one person is a clinical judgement, and it belongs to a doctor. If something feels urgent, call your doctor or your local emergency number.

NouxMe is also a pilot. We are testing it with real families and real reports, and we will keep improving how it reads reports from different labs as the pilot grows.

A personal note

I help build NouxMe, so I am not neutral. But I have sat at the table with the bag. If I lose my banking app, I reinstall it. If I lose last March's report on the morning a specialist asks for it, nobody can get it back in time. That is why NouxMe is the most valuable app on my phone.

Availability

NouxMe is in pilot on iOS, Android and the web. Families can request early access on the NouxMe page. We will share more as the pilot grows.

Health, held by you.

Related guide: Where is last year's report? How to store medical reports online

This article is general information, not medical advice. Speak to your doctor about your own reports.