How Sneaky Pete got its name

It started as one family’s folders

When Dad was diagnosed with cancer, the paperwork arrived faster than anyone could keep up with. Lab reports in one place, scan results in another, appointment dates in a calendar, medication changes in a text thread, and the questions we meant to ask the doctor somewhere in a notes app.

So I built something small for us: one private place where the records, the dates, the numbers and the questions all lived together. Nothing about it was meant for anyone else. It was meant to keep one dad’s journey from spilling across a dozen folders.

What we kept needing

Using it every week showed us what actually matters on a bad week. Not a fancier chart. The things we kept losing track of:

• What did this blood test measure, in plain words?
• Is this number up or down from last time, and is that good or bad here?
• Which doctor ordered this, and which visit was it for?
• What were we going to ask at the appointment on Thursday?
• What else is out there — and how do people describe it without overpromising?

Every part of this portal came from one of those questions being asked more than once in our kitchen.

The left hand wasn’t speaking to the right hand

The folders were bad enough. The worse part was that Dad’s doctors weren’t talking to each other. One office knew about the surgery, another knew about the chemo, a third had the blood work — and nobody had all of it. The family became the courier, carrying the same report from one practice to the next and repeating the same history on every phone call.

We wanted to fix that. So everything here is kept once and shared whole: the same labs, the same visit dates, the same medication changes, with who ordered what and which appointment it belonged to. When a doctor asks what we have, the answer is one place instead of a stack of printouts — and the offices stop relying on us to pass messages between them.

A place to keep what we researched

The other half of the job was research. Reading up on a treatment, a supplement, a scan result or a possible side effect, then arriving at the appointment with none of it written down anywhere. The question we most wanted to ask always seemed to surface in the parking lot, hours too late.

So the portal keeps the research too — what we looked up, what we wanted to ask about, what the doctor actually said, and what we still don’t know. Kept next to the visit it belongs to, research turns into a question the care team can answer instead of a thought we had on the drive home.

Why the comparisons are in it

From the beginning we wanted to understand conventional treatment alongside integrative, holistic and nutrition-focused care — not to swap one for the other, but to know what each one is actually for and what to ask about. That’s why the app lays the approaches out side by side and keeps linking back to the same reminder: talk it through with the care team.

What it is now

The same idea, a little more built out. It holds:

Who can use it

It’s still invite-only. Each person who joins is someone we added, and the health information inside a portal stays inside that portal — with only the family members that person has chosen to let in. The public guides are the only part anyone can read without signing in.

What it isn’t

Sneaky Pete is a filing cabinet with a memory, not a doctor. It stores and organises what we already know and explains general information in plain language. It does not diagnose, it does not tell anyone what treatment to choose, and it is no one’s substitute for a clinician who has actually seen the patient.