Why We Built Jini

In short: Sarhaan built a system that connected his family’s records and found a cholesterol pattern everyone had missed; Sana knew what one might have meant for her grandfather. We built Jini so every family has what ours didn’t.

Every family has one person who keeps track of everyone’s health.

They remember which medication their dad takes, when their mom’s next appointment is, where the latest blood test was saved, and which conditions run in the family. When someone gets sick, they are the person searching through old reports, calling doctors, asking relatives questions, and trying to understand what matters.

We built Jini because both of us had already become that person in our own families.

How Jini began

Sarhaan

For me, it started with my dad’s cholesterol.

His cholesterol had been extremely high for years, but he had repeatedly been told that it was probably caused by lifestyle. He believed he could improve his diet, wait a few months, and test again.

I was not convinced. Each blood test was being treated as a separate point-in-time result, but I wanted to understand what they showed when viewed together.

I am a software engineer, so I started building a simple system for my family. I collected my dad’s medical records in one place and ran scripts across them to track how his results had changed over time.

Then the system flagged that my brother’s cholesterol was also unusually high.

That made me curious. I started adding more records and more family history. Were there older blood tests? Had the numbers been steadily increasing? Did my grandparents have heart conditions? Was the same issue appearing across multiple generations?

Once I looked at everything together, the picture changed. This was no longer an unusual result from one person. It was a persistent pattern across my family that seemed far less likely to be explained by lifestyle alone.

My dad returned to the doctor with the full history and more specific questions. The conversation changed, and he began treatment.

At that point, I was still thinking of the system as something I had built for my own family. Then I told Sana about it.

Sana

As soon as Sarhaan explained what he had built, I understood why it mattered.

Years earlier, my grandfather had gone to the hospital for a rash. He already had extremely high blood pressure, and the medication he was given caused it to rise even further. He later passed away.

Looking back, my family and I were left with the painful feeling that it may have been preventable.

There were details we did not know were important, questions we did not know to ask, and moments when we might have pushed for a closer review. We cared deeply and wanted to do everything we could for him. We simply did not have his complete health history in one place or the knowledge and confidence to understand what mattered in that moment.

When Sarhaan showed me his system, I immediately thought about how different our experience might have been if we had something similar.

What if we had been able to see my grandfather’s medications, blood pressure history, symptoms, and recent changes together? What if we had known which information to bring to the doctors and which questions to ask? What if we had felt informed enough to pause and ask for a closer review when something did not feel right?

We cannot know whether it would have changed the outcome. But we knew families deserved more support than we had.

The problem

Sarhaan’s experience showed what could happen when years of records and family history were connected. Sana’s showed the consequences of having critical information scattered, incomplete, or difficult to act on.

These were different experiences, but they pointed to the same problem.

Families are often responsible for holding the most complete picture of someone’s health, yet they are given almost no support in doing it.

Records sit across patient portals, lab reports, prescriptions, text messages, camera rolls, and memory. One doctor may see one test. Another may see one symptom. However, the family is often the only group present across the entire journey.

But most families do not have a system for managing that responsibility. They are expected to remember timelines, explain symptoms clearly, track medications, notice patterns, and know which questions to ask, often while stressed, tired, or caring for someone they love.

That is the problem we started building Jini to solve.

We first built it for ourselves

Jini did not begin as a company.

It began as a collection of scripts, folders, notes, and small systems we were using to manage our own families’ health.

We added blood tests and looked at how the results changed over time. We recorded symptoms, medications, appointments, and daily updates. We collected family medical history and used the models to identify what information might be missing.

Each family member had their own record, but the system could also look across those records for patterns that would have been difficult to notice otherwise.

The more we used it, the more valuable it became.

It could review years of reports at once, notice when the same issue appeared across multiple relatives, track whether a result had been changing, and suggest questions we might not have known to ask.

We also realized Jini should not wait for someone to ask a question. When new information is added, it reviews the record in the background overnight, looks for patterns or details that may have been missed, and checks relevant research. If it finds something worth paying attention to or discussing with a doctor, Jini can proactively send the family a message.

Most importantly, it helped us prepare for conversations with doctors.

It did not make medical decisions for us. It helped us arrive with a clearer history, understand what had changed, and ask better questions.

From a personal tool to Jini

As we continued using the system, we started noticing how many healthcare problems were also information problems.

People were not always missing care because they ignored their health. Often, they struggled to explain what had been happening, could not find an old result, did not know which details were relevant, or lacked the confidence to ask for further investigation.

One such case involved a woman in her thirties who had felt exhausted for months but struggled to clearly explain her symptoms and how frequently they occurred. She was initially told it was likely stress or lifestyle. Only later, after repeated appointments and testing, did she learn that she had hypothyroidism.

Jini would not have diagnosed the condition. But it could have flagged certain patterns and helped her track when the fatigue began, which other symptoms appeared, what had already been tested, and how the pattern changed over time. It could then have turned that history into a clear appointment summary and helped her ask for the right follow-up sooner.

The more situations we explored, the more confident we became that families needed more than a place to upload medical records. They needed a system that could organize those records, understand how they connected, and help them use that information when speaking with a doctor.

What began as a tool for our own families finally became Jini.