About
Why we built
a quieter chart.
Galen is a small, opinionated patient care record from Docuity. It exists because everyone we know in small-clinic and home-care work was keeping the same chart in three places at once. We thought there should be one.
The premise
The chart is fragmented
across rooms and apps.
In a tertiary hospital, this is a solved problem — the EHR is the system of record and the rest is exhaust. In a 200-bed urban hospital, fine. In the cardiology private clinic upstairs, the community nurse round, the geriatric home visit, the elderly aunt who needs three caregivers in rotation — it is not solved.
The bedside notebook holds the vitals. The clinic's EHR holds the discharge summary and the lab PDF. The family group chat holds the question about the rash and the photo of yesterday's swelling. None of these is the chart. All of them are needed for the chart.
Galen is the chart. One record per patient, written into by anyone the patient trusts, readable by anyone the patient trusts, summarised by an AI that has read the whole thing.
Why Galen?
The chart is
one of medicine's oldest technologies.
Galen of Pergamon was a gladiator-school physician who became personal doctor to three Roman emperors. He left behind a thousand pages of case studies — the first systematic medical chart in the Western tradition.
What Galen invented wasn't a diagnosis or a drug. It was the practice of writing the patient down: the symptoms, the timeline, the treatment, the outcome. Every chart that's ever followed, paper or pixel, descends from this single discipline. The chart, in other words, is one of medicine's oldest technologies.
For seventeen centuries the chart belonged to the physician. We took Galen's name for this app because we think the next chapter of that work is changing one thing about it: the chart still gets written, just as carefully. But this time the patient holds the pen.
Principles
Four rules we hold ourselves to.
The patient owns the chart.
The chart unlocks with a code the patient holds. Without that code, a caregiver — or an admin, or a developer — cannot read it. The patient hands access out and takes it back.
Writing has to be fast.
If recording the visit takes longer than the visit, nobody will record the visit. So we built around photo capture, vision extraction, and one-paragraph daily summaries. Less typing, more attention.
The AI shows its work.
Every AI-written summary, every trend flag, every recommendation is traceable to the notes that produced it. You can drill from a flag back to the photo that triggered it. No black boxes.
Export is a first-class verb.
The chart isn't useful if it's stuck inside the app. Every chart exports as a navy-header clinical PDF and a multi-sheet Excel — designed to be handed to a doctor who has never seen Galen.
What it's not
Some things Galen
won't try to be.
Not an EHR.
We don't do billing codes, ICD-10 mapping, insurance claims, or e-prescribe. If your clinic needs those, you need an EHR. Galen sits beside it.
Not a diagnostic tool.
The AI summarises and flags trends. It does not diagnose, prescribe, or replace a clinician's judgement. Every export ends with that disclaimer for a reason.
Not a vendor seat business.
Galen is built to be self-hosted on a single box. No per-seat fees, no usage caps, no telemetry calling home. Your clinic, your hardware, your data.
Get in touch
We'd like to hear from you.
If you run a small clinic, do home-care nursing, or are wrangling care for a family member and the chart situation is driving you slightly mad — write to us. Tell us what your day looks like. We're trying to build for that.