"There has to be a better way."
MediTracer started in our home after our daughter spent more than 40 days in the NICU and came home with a feeding tube.
My wife Vanessa and I were grateful to be home. We were also learning as first-time parents, very quickly, that nothing ever goes according to plan.
Tube-feeding care was not one fixed routine. It bent around naps, spit-ups, formula adjustments, rate and volume changes, the transition away from a night feed, and the work of trying to introduce oral feeding at the same time.
The care plan lived in motion, and Vanessa and I needed to stay aligned as the day changed.
I started looking for a tool that could help us stay aligned around tube-feeding care. I wanted something that understood the practical reality of feeding care at home: not just logging a feed, but helping everyone around a child understand what had happened, what had changed, and what needed to happen next.
I could not find it.
So we started trying to build it for ourselves.
Built From Two Kinds of Knowing
Vanessa brought the empathy of both a nurse and a mother. She understood which details mattered clinically, which changes were important to notice, and how quickly a well-intended workflow could fall apart when a family was tired, busy, or interrupted.
She became a driving force behind one question we kept asking: would this actually reduce the burden on a family, or would it become one more thing they had to maintain?
I brought a different kind of instinct. I have been obsessed with computers since I was 8 years old. I have always been a tinkerer. If something feels inefficient or fragile, my brain immediately starts taking it apart and imagining how it could work differently.
That combination became the foundation for MediTracer: nursing judgment, lived family experience, and a builder's belief that the painful parts of a routine are worth studying closely.
For a while, it still felt like something we were making for our own home.
Then we started talking with other families.
Again and again, we heard versions of the same story. The children, supplies, routines, and caregivers varied from family to family. The pressure underneath was familiar: keep everyone aligned while life kept changing.
That was the moment this became more than a personal workaround.
It was a shared problem.
Since then, Tubular Daily Care has been through alpha testing and is now in beta. Our family's routine gave the work its first shape, and early family use has pushed it beyond our home.
Why Tubular Daily Care Exists
Tubular Daily Care is our first product because tube-feeding care made one burden impossible for us to ignore: keeping the whole care routine understandable as the day changed.
The earlier product journey involved prototypes, hardware experiments, and a lot of technical learning. I have written more about that path before, and we will keep sharing pieces of it. But the most important lesson was simple: the right solution is not always the cleverest one.
The right solution is the one families can actually use.
Tubular Daily Care is made for families. We are designing it to help them keep feeds, meds, flushes, symptoms, supplies, care changes, and what needs attention next easier to follow as plans change. Their energy is better used elsewhere: caring for their child, resting when they can, getting to appointments, advocating, playing, recovering from the last hard thing, preparing for the next one.
Documentation should not become another full-time job.
Tubular is not meant to replace clinical instructions or tell a family what to change. It is meant to help families follow the plan they were given, notice what happened across the day, and bring clearer context into a doctor visit or care appointment.
The goal is not to make feeding care feel clinical at home. The goal is to make the home-care day easier to understand. What happened? What changed? Who needs to know? What is the next feed supposed to look like? What notes might make a doctor visit or care appointment more complete?
If Tubular does its job well, it gives families a clearer shared understanding of the day and fewer chances for important details, patterns, or next steps to fall between people.
Why Oley Matters
That is why participating in Oley's Emerging Innovator program means so much to us.
We are grateful to share that MediTracer is joining Oley as an Emerging Innovator Partner while Tubular moves through beta and toward public release.
Oley has long served the home nutrition support community through education, advocacy, connection, and practical support. It brings together people living with tube feeding or parenteral nutrition, caregivers, clinicians, suppliers, founders, and the broader community around them.
That is the community where Tubular belongs: with families who may need it, adults who use feeding tubes, and the professionals and partners who understand daily care from different angles.
Come See Us in Madison
We will have a booth at Oley 2026 - Infusing Hope in Madison, Wisconsin, from July 10-13, 2026.
If you are attending, please stop by and say hello.
We are aiming to go into the conference with the public release of Tubular Daily Care ready, and we want to meet as many members of the community as we can: families, adults who use feeding tubes, providers, suppliers, founders, clinicians, Oley leaders, and anyone whose life or work touches home nutrition support.
If you are attending in Madison, we would love to show you Tubular and hear where it could help with the daily-care moments that are harder than they should be.
A medication dose that gets given twice because two people each thought it was theirs to give. A feed volume that has been coming up short every day, but no one notices the pattern for a month. A formula, rate, flush, or timing change that makes sense in the moment but never quite becomes part of the routine. A symptom pattern that only becomes clear when you are trying to explain the last few weeks at an appointment.
If the beta fits your family, we can help you get started. If it is not the right fit yet, we still want to understand what would make Tubular useful, safe, and not just another thing families have to maintain.
MediTracer exists because we kept saying, "there has to be a better way."
Tubular Daily Care exists because we learned we were not the only ones saying it.
Oley reminds us that this work belongs in community.
And this July, in Madison, we are excited to listen.