Ten minutes, and the notes you brought
The most useful thing you can take to a short appointment is a record: when it happened, how bad it was, what you had done that day, and what you took. Written at the time, it is evidence. Reconstructed in the room, it is a guess, and a guess phrased confidently is worse than saying you do not remember. Every app below is a way of writing things down at the time; none of them is a diagnosis, and the ones that imply otherwise are the ones to be most careful with.
What to record, and what to leave out
| Record | How | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Date and time of onset | A tap, not a paragraph | Patterns live in the timing |
| Severity on a fixed scale | The same scale every time | Comparable between weeks |
| Duration and what ended it | A note of minutes or hours | Distinguishes kinds of episode |
| Medication actually taken | Dose and time, including missed doses | The first question you will be asked |
| Sleep, food, cycle, exertion | Only the ones you suspect | Two or three factors, not twenty |
| A photograph, where visible | Same light, something for scale | A rash on Tuesday is gone by Friday |
Advertisement
The apps
The most flexible general tracker: you define the symptoms, factors and scales, then log with a few taps. Its correlation view over weeks is the closest thing here to insight rather than record keeping.
Migraine Buddy. Built for one condition and much better for it than any general app, with attack timing, triggers, medication and a report designed for a consultation.
A mood and activity tracker with custom entries. Fast enough that people keep it going, which matters more than any feature, and its export is clean.
Blood pressure readings from a real cuff, with tags, averages and a proper export. Simple, local and long established.
The friendlier alternative for the same job, with charts that are easy to show somebody across a desk.
Diabetes:M. Detailed logging of glucose, insulin, carbohydrate and activity, with reports that clinics recognise. More app than most people need, and the right one when you need it.
The plain version of that: a log, a graph and an export, without a programme attached.
Cycle tracking with a research background and a reasonable record on data. Relevant far beyond periods, because for many conditions the cycle is one of the factors worth logging.
The most widely used alternative, with a simpler interface and a large number of optional symptoms to log.
A general health diary that can pull readings from connected meters as well as taking them by hand, which saves transcribing numbers twice.
Medication reminders with an adherence record. The log of doses actually taken is the part that ends up mattering in the appointment.
Health Connect. Not a diary; the layer that lets the trackers share data with each other instead of each keeping its own island.
A triage questionnaire rather than a diary or a diagnosis. Useful for deciding whether today needs an appointment, and not to be quoted as a finding.
Plain text files in a folder. The most durable diary there is: no account, no subscription, still readable in ten years, and it prints as well as anything else.
Thirty seconds of talking beats typing when you feel awful. Record it and write it up later, or take the recording as the note.
For the letters, results and discharge notes that arrive on paper. One PDF per document, named by date, and the appointment stops beginning with a search.
Reading and annotating those PDFs, and the reliable way to check that the export you are about to hand over actually contains what you think.
Getting it out of the app
- Find the export before you rely on the app CSV or PDF, in the settings. An app with no export is a diary you cannot take anywhere, and that is worth discovering in week one rather than the night before.
- Produce one page, not forty Most apps will export everything. A clinician has minutes: a summary of the last month, with the worst days marked, is read; a spreadsheet is not.
- Put the medication list on the same page What you take, the dose, and what you stopped taking and when. This is asked every time.
- Bring it as paper or a PDF, not as an app to demonstrate Handing over a phone and scrolling through an interface uses the appointment up. A printed page or a PDF sent ahead does not.
- Write your two questions at the top The diary is context. The questions are what you came for, and they are the first thing that gets forgotten.
- Keep the raw log as well The summary is for the appointment; the full record is for the next one, when somebody asks whether this has happened before.
Health data, and where it is going
- Local storage with an export you control
- A stated retention and deletion policy
- Optional rather than compulsory accounts
- Plain CSV or PDF output
- A clear answer about research sharing
- Trackers in an app about your health
- Advertising targeted on what you logged
- Symptom checkers presented as diagnosis
- Readings taken by the phone's camera
- Subscriptions that lock your own history
This is the most sensitive category of data most people put into a phone, and the business models around it vary enormously. An app that keeps everything locally and exports a file is the safest default. If you do use one with an account, it is worth ten minutes to read what it says about sharing with partners and with research programmes, and to decide rather than to accept.
Log at the time, use the same scale every time, keep it to a few factors, and export one page with the medication list and your two questions at the top.
Frequently asked questions
How long should I log before an appointment?
Four weeks is usually enough to show a pattern, and two is better than nothing. Logging for a year and bringing the lot is less useful than logging for a month and summarising it.
Is a general tracker or a condition-specific one better?
Condition specific, if one exists for yours, because the fields and the report are already the right shape. A general tracker is the answer when you are logging several unrelated things.
Can an app tell me what is wrong?
No. A triage questionnaire can tell you whether to seek care today, which is a different and genuinely useful thing. Nothing on a phone produces a diagnosis.
What about readings from a watch or a cuff?
Readings from a proper cuff or meter are worth logging and worth showing. Numbers a phone or watch infers indirectly are worth treating as trends at best, and they should be labelled as such when you hand the page over.
Read next
Nothing has infected your phone. Something you installed has permission, and the fix is a list in settings.
A phone will happily run a keyboard, a mouse and a memory stick. It will not power a desktop hard drive.
Hard and fast are different things. Almost every game confuses them, and these do not.
