Why this exists

It started with Melissa.

For years, every new specialist meant the same ritual: my wife's history, recited from memory at the start of the appointment. Three open-heart surgeries. A heart valve. A stroke. Then breast cancer.

Every doctor needed the whole picture — and every time, the whole picture depended on how well I could tell it.

The first of those operations was in 1967, when she was a baby. The most recent chapter is still being written. A specialist meeting her today needs both ends of that, and everything in between.

None of it was missing. It was all there, in files, in letters, in discharge summaries. It was simply unreadable in the time a consultation gives you.

Published with Melissa's blessing.

Melissa and Ben together at the water's edge on the Sunshine Coast
Melissa and me — Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

The gap

The record holds the history. It doesn't hold the person.

A patient management system stores all of this faithfully, as prose, in the order it arrived. That is exactly the form in which it can't be read quickly — and it says nothing about who is sitting in the chair.

How the history reads in the record

…open-heart surgery, subsequent valve replacement… further cardiac procedures as per correspondence… cerebrovascular event with residual deficit… previous admissions documented elsewhere… subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer, treatment as per oncology…

— continues across decades of letters
Who she is
  • Primary school teacher
  • ESOL teacher
  • Deputy principal
  • Mother of our boys

Melissa spent her career in classrooms and in school leadership, and teaching English to speakers of other languages. The stroke ended that work. It didn't end anything else.

The attempt, and the second attempt

Eight years too early.

I first tried to build something for this eight years ago, and couldn't. The hard part — reading a messy discharge letter and actually understanding it — simply didn't exist yet.

Now it does. OpenClinicalHistory is what I couldn't build then: a way for a clinician to see everything that has happened to a patient in seconds, instead of hearing it read aloud.

It is no longer for Melissa. It is a framework any health organisation can run against its own records, and it is looking for the people who will take it further than I can on my own.

Who's building it

One architect, evenings and weekends.

I'm Ben — a solutions architect with more than two decades in financial services and insurance technology, designing the systems that sit underneath claims, policy and payments for organisations across a dozen or so countries. Regulated data, messy legacy records, standards, integration and scale are the ordinary furniture of that work.

None of it is clinical. What it does give me is a very specific instinct: when an industry keeps critical information as free text, everything downstream — reporting, exchange, analytics, automation — stays stuck until someone codes it. Health has that problem at a scale finance sorted out years ago.

So this is built by someone from the outside, for a reason that isn't professional. I am not a clinician, and OpenClinicalHistory is deliberately shaped so clinicians stay in charge of every judgement it touches.

  • FieldSolutions architecture — financial services and insurance platforms
  • Experience20+ years designing and delivering regulated, data-heavy systems
  • BasedSunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia
  • Role hereAuthor of the reference implementation; not a clinician, not a medical-device manufacturer