Show HN: Kula – a family health platform that makes sense of your data | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kula – a family health platform that makes sense of your data

6 pointssamuraikmc12 comments

My parents are in India, I'm in the US. Their health system was continuous WhatsApp photos of lab reports, vague updates over the phone, and me finding out about doctor visits weeks later. So I built Kula. Upload lab reports (photo, PDF, WhatsApp forward) and it have them parsed and track trends. Connect a wearable and track daily health signals as well as your baselines. Everything goes into one record you can search and review over time. There's a chat layer where you can ask questions in plain language like, "what's my dad's cholesterol trend showing", and get a sourced answer from your own data. Primarily built it for my family. My parents told me they'd use it even without me, just to have their records organized before doctor visits. That truly changed how I think about it.

Looking for feedback on this platform. Would you use this? What are your thoughts? What's missing?

www.mykula.health

Nobody with a brain would upload such a sensitive information to close source cloud platform. To make this even worse this platform probably uses third party LLMs its sharing your data with other company.

As stated in other comments, we do adhere to strict policies for compliance, and data privacy. We follow best practices for GDPR and HIPAA compliance. Furthermore, nothing is locally hosted. It is all through Azure and their services, which adds further security and compliance through their BAA. All PII information is stripped before API calls and no data is used to train their models. Furthermore, your data is yours! You can download everything or wipe it from our side if you choose so.

The goal is to bring together health information to bring about better understanding and potentially health outcomes.

Would you be interested in trying this out for yourself?

Some things that came to mind that you could fix quickly if you want to: You gotta publish bullet-proof privacy policy and terms of use. You also need to disclose what underlying API you're using (Anthropic, OpenAI, something else?). I'd personally stay with US API providers because of their strong "no using your data" policies. However, that could change at any moment, so you have to be careful.

Positives: Looks great! The use case particularly resonates with me, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.

Suggestion: Instead of me having to ask questions, the app should surface divergent metrics on its own. That's the unlock imho!

Great work, keep it up!

At onboarding, we do provide a term sheet that a user can download.

Regarding API, we use varying models depending on the use case, but yes they're either Openai or Claude. Since everything is hosted on Microsoft Azure, everything is routed through their Foundry.

Regarding asking questions, it does surface insights for wearables daily. For lab records, that's what is being added right now.

Thank you so much for your feedback! Please do register if you'd like to try it out. I would really appreciate feedback on the app itself, whether you use it individually or with others too.

I meant give the info up front on the website.

Currently, I'm not sure if my and my loved ones' info will be up for grabs at some point to a hacker. How do you make sure that it's encrypted/secured on your end? Are the uploaded documents saved on your server or only transient while the inference is occurring?

If the ToU and Privacy Policy are available before download, it'll make it much easier for people to join. What are your promises to the user that you will NOT sell their data, etc.?

Please understand that I'm not implying that you, per se, are being underhanded, just saying out loud the questions that come to my mind.

Great concept! Keep it up!

Totally get you. This is the kind of feedback I've got in the most often.

I will surely make all the data and privacy much more clear upfront.

Thanks so much!

Would love for you to register and let me know how you like it!

Hey the use-case resonates with me. My parents live in a different country and I often have a whatsapp group + a google drive just built to keep a track of health reports. Tempted to use it. How are you handling privacy though? Where does this get stored?

I feel you haha. I've seen way too much of this and is not how health (which is so precious) should be handled and treated.

We host all services on Microsoft Azure and any API calls are through their Model Foundry. We also strip any kind of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) before we make these calls for added privacy.

We are GDPR compliant (UK/Europe) and have all the compliance for HIPAA in place (although not officially certified since we are not medical).

You can download all your data at any time and even delete it completely from our servers. This is all an option through the app.

Please do register on the website. Would love to hear your further thoughts and any feedback you'd have for us. We are still in testing with early users and would love to have you on board

Really neat idea and clean UI, would definitely use this if not for a slight reluctance to upload that kind of data to the cloud, but I know some people don't care. If there were a version I could whip out on my own home server, I would do that.

We host all services on Microsoft Azure and any API calls are through their Foundry. We also strip any kind of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) before we make these calls for added privacy.

We are GDPR compliant (UK/Europe) and have all the compliance for HIPAA in place (although not officially certified since we are not medical). You can download all your data at any time and even delete it completely from our servers. This is all an option through the app.

Would you be interested in trying it out? Please do register on the website. Love to hear your further thoughts.

I love the idea, maybe I’ll use such product if it’s open source , self hosted and has my local llm . Otherwise it’s a privacy nightmare..

I totally get it, health data is definitely personal. Everything runs on Azure, PII is stripped before any AI calls, and you can wipe all your data anytime. Open source unfortunately isn't on the roadmap right now, but privacy is something we take seriously from the architecture level.

At the end of the day, it's built for you and your and loved ones. Since I know personally of families using this, a lot of care has been taken on this front.

Appreciate the feedback.

Would anything make you feel more at ease to try using it?

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