Everything you tell Atenda goes into one place. I call it the reservoir. It is yours.
Not ours. Not your doctor’s. Not your family’s. Yours.
What fills it is whatever you say. She slept four hours. The pills are still on the counter from Tuesday. She almost went down in the hallway and I caught her. She called me by her sister’s name and I let it go. I am tired and I have not told anyone.
I have been using an early version for two months. At least once a day. Most days, twice.
Two things surprised me:
When I take my wife Gail’s blood pressure, I take a picture of the cuff when it finishes and send it. That is the whole job. The reading, the date, the time, all in the record. I write nothing down.
And Atenda reminds me twice a day, gently. Some days I ignore her. But I journal now, every day, and in five years of caring for Gail I never did.
Nothing comes out of the reservoir unless you decide it does.
Four reports can be drawn from it:
Yours. Everything Atenda has learned about the person you care for, and about you.
Your family’s. The same report, except the line about how tired you are is not in it. Your brother gets how your mother is doing. He does not get how you are doing unless you want him to.
Your doctor’s. The clinical one. Dated observations in your own words, organized the way a doctor reads.
The six-month one. Your doctor can do a full cognitive review twice a year, and that review needs six months of history that nobody can produce from memory in a fifteen-minute appointment. You will not have to.
You decide who gets which. That is the part I care about most.
Ask ChatGPT about the pills on the counter, and it is not building a dedicated caregiving record around your mother. It is a brilliant tool, but it was never built to be your mother’s caregiving record.
Atenda keeps one reservoir per caregiver. Atenda keeps what you put in it, and it never pours anything anywhere you did not send it.
It is yours. It always was.
Gregg
Get a letter like this every Tuesday.
