Long-time friends and now business partners, Arlene Goodwin (left) and Susan Green are launching their new app mA.I Health. Photo / Anna Heath
Kiwi mum Arlene Goodwin is launching an app to help patients quickly access their medical records after battling the health system to help her son.
The new app, mA.I Health, launching on November 28, is designed to safely store medical information to help people access their own health data within seconds. It uses AI to scan reports and documents to produce clear summaries for the user.
As growing wait times for GPs and the loss of the family doctor role impact patients’ care, it is becoming less likely a doctor will have comprehensive knowledge of a patient’s medical history and appointments are often time-constrained.
Goodwin, who is a mother and stepmother to six children, says she is determined to make a change to the health system after having to carry around a large, A4-sized ring binder stuffed with her son’s medical records.
Luca Goodwin, 11, was born with a congenital heart defect and had to undergo three rounds of open-heart surgery, with the first happening when he was 4 days old.
The new app is designed for people to view their health information, such as prior allergies to medication, summaries of reports done by specialists, previous illnesses or their vaccination history, in one place.
Luca experienced a post-operative stroke that led to a number of neurological consequences for him, including developing a rare childhood sleep epilepsy syndrome.
In a New York hospital in 2024, Goodwin was told the left side of Luca’s brain had to be disconnected to save his life. The hemispherectomy operation prevents seizures that don’t respond to medication.
During this time, Goodwin’s nightmare scenario about Luca’s medical history led to her thinking of the idea for the app.
“What happens to him if something happens to me? If I’m not there, even my husband couldn’t remember or know all the intricacies of his care like I do,” Goodwin says.
She is devoted to Luca and lived in a rehab hospital with him in New Jersey for three months to help him recover, eventually returning with the family to New Zealand.
When Luca had a seizure on a holiday in Queenstown, despite the urgency of the situation, hospital staff were delayed by having to ask Goodwin for the phone number of a specialist to access vital medical records.
“Honestly, I think I’ve learned to shut down. You know, I get very robotic when the pressure gets really high, I kind of compartmentalise and become very much one foot in front of the other, because if I am not on my game, who’s going to look after him?”
Goodwin says the app can help parents who are divorced and co-parenting, or larger families, because of a feature that enables people to link their profiles and share health information.
Moving between two health systems, the United States and New Zealand, and being shuffled through endless specialist appointments exposed her to the problem of a lack of information sharing between GPs, specialists and hospitals. For the patient, Goodwin saw the outcome of this inefficiency was adverse care.
“I’m very intolerant. I’m exceptionally intolerant ... I think he’s too important to me.
“The number of times I have challenged a doctor in an emergency room before giving a medication or making a diagnosis, I can’t even count. It’s because there’s no one sitting holistically on top of it all, the specialists and doctors are all in their silos and different fields.”
Goodwin developed the app alongside her business partner Susan Green. They share decades of friendship and similar backgrounds in law and banking but have committed themselves to building the app as their fulltime jobs for the past three years.
The pair have been helped by two offshore tech-experts. Together the group of four have invested heavily in getting the app to its launch date but will have to raise further capital for the next stage of development.
They want every Kiwi to be able to access and control their own medical information and avoid falling through the cracks of the health system.
There are growing questions over how AI is being used in healthcare and whether it will impact patient privacy. Health New Zealand recently announced an “AI scribe” called Heidi will be used in 16 of 38 emergency departments nationwide.
Goodwin says mA.I Health uses a closed-circuit AI system that is highly secure and will prevent health data from being shared wrongfully.
There are plenty of competitors in this field, Green says, but the tech firms and insurance companies aren’t placing patients at the centre of developing this technology, whereas the motivations behind their app are to allow people to have autonomy over their own health information.
“In so many countries, healthcare data storage is really fragmented, and it’s become almost political or commercial getting access to that information,” Green says.
“Some people are really diligent and they do keep all of their health data on storage platforms, but they don’t actually realise it’s not secure and prone to attacks.”
The mA.I Health app is free for those under 16 but there is a subscription price of about $3.99 per month to download it.
Green says globally there is a need for health data to be more accessible and stored better, but enforcing change is a time-consuming and costly process that is difficult for governments to enforce.
For Goodwin, parts of her journey with Luca have been “beyond terrifying” and she would like to try to save other parents from experiencing the same pain.
Goodwin and Green want the mA.I Health app to shift the dial towards the best interests of patients.
Eva de Jong is a reporter covering general news for the New Zealand Herald, Weekend Herald and Herald on Sunday. She was previously a multimedia journalist for the Whanganui Chronicle, covering health stories and general news.
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