Building an offline-first medical records app for clinics

ArcCare exists because clinics don't always have reliable internet, and a medical records app that stops working without a connection is worse than useless — it's a liability at exactly the moment staff need it most.

Local-first, not cloud-first

Every record lives encrypted on the device first. The app is fully usable — checking in patients, updating charts, booking follow-ups — with zero connectivity. Sync is something that happens in addition to the app working, not a requirement for it to work at all.

Conflict resolution is the actual hard problem

Once you allow multiple devices to go offline independently and edit the same patient's chart, you eventually get conflicting writes. We resolve these with field-level merge rules rather than "last write wins" — a note added on one device and a new prescription added on another shouldn't silently clobber each other.

No cloud dependency, by design

We don't operate infrastructure that clinic data passes through. That's a deliberate constraint, not a missing feature: it means a data breach on our end simply isn't a scenario that can happen, because there's no "our end" holding the data.

What's next

Multi-clinic sync for practices with more than one location is the current focus, keeping the same offline-first guarantees across sites.