Meet Foundling — A binder for the rare-disease journey

Medical

Foundling

A binder for the rare-disease journey.

Every feature, from the first launch.

No account, no login, no cloud. Everything runs on your device and works fully offline — nothing in this post is hidden behind a wall.

What Foundling does

Foundling is the personal medical binder for the 30 million Americans living with a rare disease. When the diagnosis is rare, the patient — or the parent of a patient — becomes the project manager. Records arrive from a dozen specialists. Symptoms shift. Medications stack. Trial criteria appear in one specialist's offhand sentence and vanish before the next appointment. Foundling keeps the whole picture in one place, on your device, in your pocket.

What ships in v1:

— Symptom journal: log severity (1-10), affected systems, and free-text notes. Daily, weekly, or as-needed. Charts surface trends across the last 30 / 90 / 180 days. — Conditions register: track diagnoses (ICD-10), date of diagnosis, diagnosing physician, current status. A pre-loaded library of ~80 well-characterized rare diseases (Ehlers-Danlos, POTS, Mast Cell Activation, Wilson's, Fabry, Pompe, Stickler, and others) ships in the bundle for quick selection. — Medication tracker: drug, dose, route, schedule, prescribed by, started, ended. Side-effect notes alongside each. — Care team: every specialist, their practice, their direct line, their notes. Tap-to-call. — Visit prep: before each appointment, draft the 3 questions you must ask, the 3 symptoms to mention, the 3 documents to bring. Surfaces in a checklist on appointment day. — Documents vault: snap or import medical reports, lab panels, imaging summaries. Foundling runs on-device Vision text recognition so you can search across them — without anything ever leaving your device. — Trial criteria worksheet: a bundled checklist of common clinical-trial inclusion/exclusion criteria, by disease class. Track which criteria you meet, which you don't, and what blocks you. — Personal medical timeline: one page that strings diagnosis, hospitalizations, medication starts, and major symptom events into a single chronological view — exportable as a PDF you can hand to a new specialist on visit one. — Privacy by default: no account, no analytics, no third-party SDK, no cloud sync, no server. Photos, OCR text, and journal entries stay on your device. Nothing transmits. — Completely free: no ads, no subscription, no IAP, no "unlock."

Foundling is for the patient (and the patient's parent, spouse, or adult child) who is tired of carrying a manila folder of paper records into every consult, and tired of every new doctor starting from zero.

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

Symptom journal — Daily severity tracking with affected-systems tagging and trends charts.
Conditions + medications — ICD-10-indexed conditions register and a parallel medications tracker.
Care team — Specialists, practices, direct lines, tap-to-call.
Document vault — Snap or import medical records — on-device OCR makes them searchable.
Trial criteria — Track clinical-trial inclusion/exclusion criteria.
Medical timeline + PDF — One-page chronological export.

Why we built it

About 30 million Americans live with one of ~7,000 rare diseases. The diagnostic odyssey averages 4-8 years, and once diagnosed, care fragments across specialists who don't share systems. The patient becomes the integrator. Existing solutions are either (a) generic health apps like Apple Health that don't model rare-d…

What makes it different

Foundling is the only iOS app that combines a rare-disease library (with ICD-10), a structured symptom journal, a care-team directory, an on-device document vault with OCR search, a trial-criteria checklist, AND a one-page exportable medical timeline — all without an account or any network calls. Apple Health stores d…

Who it's for

Sandwich-generation caregivers, adult children of aging parents, and anyone keeping records for more than one person.

In one line: A binder for the rare-disease journey.

Try it

See the Foundling app page for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use Foundling, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.