A nurse who got the disease, then built the thing he wanted.

Why a nurse built a dashboard

Being a nurse does not help much when the diagnosis is yours. What I found when I went looking for reliable information was a mess: a randomized trial and a forum protocol sitting side by side on the same page, with nothing to tell them apart, and advice that contradicted itself between two sites.

So I built one file. A food guide where every rating says how solid it is. A meal planner that starts from what is actually in the kitchen on a bad week. A place to keep lab values, so the trend is visible instead of a single figure on a printout. Treatment cards that explain what a drug class does, without doses and without ranking anything.

I made it a single HTML file for a reason that has nothing to do with engineering taste: I did not want my disease on someone else's server. The file opens in any browser, works with the wifi off, and saves a copy of itself with my values inside it. There is no account to create, and there is nothing for me to see.

What I am, and what I am not

I am a state-registered nurse in France (infirmier diplômé d'État), in daily clinical practice. I have a long-standing interest in functional and integrative medicine, micronutrition and hormonal health, which is why this tool pays as much attention to food and lab markers as it does to treatment. And I have ulcerative colitis, which is why it pays attention to bad days.

I am not a physician, not a gastroenterologist, and not a registered dietitian. I am not licensed to practise in the United States, and I am not your patient's clinician.

That matters for how you should read the product. Colitis Compass does not give medical advice and does not stand in for your judgement. It is an organizing tool: it puts the information in one place, marks how solid each piece of it is, and sends the patient back to you and to their gastroenterologist for everything that counts. If you license it, the advice your patient acts on is still yours.

Why the American version is a rewrite, not a translation

The first version was French, for French patients, with French labs and a French plate. Translating it would have produced something subtly useless: grams and mmol/L, foods nobody buys, and no mention of the two things that shape an American patient's year, prior authorization and step therapy.

So it was rebuilt. Conventional U.S. units throughout, with the CRP mg/L versus mg/dL trap spelled out because laboratories report it both ways. CBC and CMP vocabulary. Grits, bagels, corn tortillas, sweet tea, Gatorade, ranch, rotisserie chicken and coffee creamer, with regional tags, because the United States does not eat one way. Treatment cards that say what a biosimilar switch is going to feel like before it happens. The method page sets out how each of those decisions was made.

Why it is sold once, and not rented

There are two usual ways to make money from a health app. You can charge every month, or you can make the data the product. I did not want either.

A subscription would mean the patient loses the tool when they stop paying, which is exactly the wrong thing to do to someone managing a lifelong illness. Selling data would mean collecting it, which would undo the only architectural decision I actually care about.

So there is one price, paid once, and no server to fund. The license covers the version delivered. New versions may be offered separately, and license holders hear about them first. Nothing expires, nothing phones home, nothing stops working.

Corrections are the quality process

Every clinical statement in the tool is written so that a professional can check it, every research entry links to its source, and every food rating shows its level of evidence so you can see what you would be disagreeing with.

If you find something wrong, tell me: [email protected]. Corrections reported by clinicians go into the next version. That feedback loop is the only quality process a one-person product can honestly claim, so I take it seriously.

Where I am

Alsace, in eastern France. I work in English, by email. There is no support desk behind this product: mail goes to me.