Getting fancy, you can buy nice charts with colorful status stickers. Minus the stickers, you can print the charts on any printer. All of this is private.
What you're saying is exactly like a logistics company saying - why should we enter our logs into this computer? What's the point? A pen and paper seem to work just fine... We all know how that story turned out. This story is playing out with women's lives instead of efficiency points/dollars in the global economy (though at some level it does map to do that as well), and real people are suffering as a result. They deserve better.
Hint for those watching: HIPPA doesn't apply to self-gathered self-entered data, and there are many (insurance companies, drug companies, diaper services...) who would love to know this data.
That's the thing: us from the outside don't know this (particularly men, but I'm guessing many women as well). But we do know that over-engineering is an endemic problem in our industry, including in the healthcare area. So the question seems fair, because we don't want to see people's health being exploited by selling them useless stuff. Because those abound. It's always the makers/sellers' job to show that their thing is useful.
A pen and paper seem to work just fine... We all know how that story turned out.
No, not all of us know. People - even those in the logistics space - still ask that question today. As someone who helped develop such solutions, educating people was part and parcel of our business.
Except that notepad can't tell you in semi-real time what is going on.
A proper tracker can tell when "Hey, this period is likely to be short." or "Yo, go get checked, something is very weird."