# The Missing Link Between a Fifteen-Minute Consult and the Months That Follow A veterinary appointment gives you fifteen minutes, maybe twenty if you are lucky. In that window your vet examines your pet, listens to the heart, runs through the history and gives you a plan. Then you go home, and the real work begins. The weeks and months that follow are where the plan is actually lived out, and that is exactly the stretch where information tends to go missing. I built a free health tracker to close that gap. It started as a tool for cardiac cases, because heart disease is where the day-to-day detail matters most, but it works just as well for any pet. Think of it as the record that sits between what you discussed in the consult and what actually happens once you are back home. You can fill it in during the appointment, so the right data gets recorded properly at the moment it is fresh. Then when you come back for a check-up, you export everything relevant and hand your vet the complete picture rather than a half-remembered summary. > **Screenshot placement:** app home screen / dashboard overview ## What you can actually track Most owners have wanted to keep tabs on at least one of these at some point, and usually more than one: Your pet's sleeping respiratory rate. What vaccines have been given and when the next ones are due. Which supplements your pet is taking. Which medications, at what dose, how often, and when they are going to run out. Which anti-parasite drugs you should be using and when they are next due. Your pet's weight, diet and appetite. Activity levels. Any seizure, collapse or syncope events, or just the "funny turns" that are hard to describe over the phone. And the specifics your vet gave you, including the diagnosis, the stage of cardiac disease and the grade of any murmur. That is a lot to hold in your head between visits. It is a lot to hold in your head between rooms in your own house. The point of writing it down in one place is that you stop relying on memory and start relying on a record. ## Why a baseline matters more than any single reading If your pet is fit and healthy right now, it is easy to let vaccination boosters and parasite cover slip to the back of your mind. The same goes for something as simple as a weight record. Nothing is wrong, so nothing prompts you to write anything down. The problem shows up later. Without a baseline, you and your vet have nothing to compare against if something does change. A weight of four kilograms means very little on its own. A weight of four kilograms when your cat was five last year means something, and it means it immediately. What this means for you: log your pet's normal weight, vaccination schedule and antiparasitic cover now, while everything is stable. Then any drift from that baseline shows up in seconds rather than months. > **Screenshot placement:** weight trend chart / baseline record ## The early signs are quiet, which is exactly why they get missed If your dog is slowing down on walks, or your cat seems to breathe a little faster while asleep, these small changes are often the earliest sign that the heart is starting to struggle. On their own they are easy to explain away. A slower walk becomes "he's getting older". A faster breathing rate becomes "it was a warm evening". Individually, each of those explanations might even be right. The trouble is that a single observation, remembered vaguely a fortnight later, cannot tell you whether you are looking at a warm evening or a genuine trend. Only a series of readings can do that. This is where sleeping respiratory rate earns its place as the single most useful thing you can monitor at home. You count the breaths your pet takes while genuinely asleep, over a full minute. A settled, healthy pet usually sits comfortably under 30 breaths a minute. A sleeping rate that creeps above 30 is worth paying attention to. A rate consistently above 40 is an emergency and warrants a call to your vet straight away. What this means for you: the app lets you log resting respiratory rate, coughing and activity over time, so a real trend stands out clearly instead of being lost in the gaps between visits. > **Screenshot placement:** sleeping respiratory rate logging + trend graph ## If your pet already has a heart diagnosis Once a diagnosis is in place, daily life often means juggling medications, dosing times and repeat prescriptions before they run out. On top of the logistics, you are also watching for coughing, fainting episodes and any change in appetite. It is a genuine mental load, and it tends to fall on one person in the household. The tracker is built to carry some of that load for you. It records every medication with its dose and frequency, and it keeps an eye on stock levels so a repeat prescription does not catch you out on a Sunday. Alongside the drugs, it holds the clinical detail your vet gave you: the ACVIM stage and the murmur grade, so the numbers that define your pet's status are written down rather than half-remembered. It also logs syncope and seizure events as they happen, with the date and a note. Those episodes are notoriously hard to describe accurately after the fact, and a contemporaneous record is far more useful to your vet than a description reconstructed from memory a month later. What this means for you: you and your vet can see exactly how your pet has been doing between appointments, rather than piecing it together from what you happen to recall on the day. > **Screenshot placement:** medication list with dose, frequency and stock/refill alert ## Built around your pet's stage The same app suits very different pets because it adapts to where yours sits. Below is what that looks like in practice.

Stage	What to track
Healthy pets	Vaccination and antiparasitic records, baseline weight and diet
At-risk pets	Resting respiratory rate, coughing and activity trends
Cardiac patients	Medications, dosing and stock monitoring, ACVIM staging, murmur progression, syncope and seizure logging

Across all three, you get trends, charts and reports you can share directly with your vet. > **Screenshot placement:** exportable vet report / summary view ## What it costs and where your data lives The app is completely free to use. It keeps all data local to your device, and it runs as a web app or straight in your browser, with no account needed. An iOS app is hopefully coming soon. It works offline, so a poor signal in the consult room is not a problem. All of this is part of a straightforward aim: to improve the link between vets and pet owners, and to benefit every patient we are caring for. Better records make for better consultations, and better consultations make for better decisions about your pet. ## Start with one thing today You do not need to fill in every field to get value from this. Pick the one that matters most for your pet right now. If they are healthy, log the current weight and the next vaccination and parasite dates. If you have noticed them slowing down, start counting the sleeping respiratory rate a few evenings a week. If they already have a heart diagnosis, get the medications, doses and the current ACVIM stage recorded so nothing lives only in your memory. Open the health tracker and put the first entry in. The next appointment will be a great deal more useful for it. > **Call to action / button:** OPEN THE HEALTH TRACKER