About six in ten U.S. adults live with a chronic disease, according to the CDC, and most of what those conditions do to them happens between doctor visits. A 15-minute appointment cannot capture weeks of migraines, pain flares, and panic attacks, so patients reconstruct them from memory and clinicians work from an incomplete record. PatternMD gives those patients a free symptom tracker that records the weather, air quality, sleep, and workouts around every entry, then surfaces the patterns between visits. Users log mental and physical symptoms in a single record, and other users see only an anonymous PMD-ID, never a name or photo. When a patient chooses to share, a one-tap visit summary and a provider portal let a Spanish-speaking patient and an English-speaking clinician read each other live, a feature that matters in a state where about one in three residents speak a language other than English at home. Since launching in April 2026, the app has signed up more than 500 users in English, Spanish, German, and Vietnamese and earned a place in the VA PathFinder Innovation Repository.
AlleyWatch sat down with PatternMD Founder and CEO Pedro Infante to learn more about the business, why he built it in New York, what comes next, including a first provider-portal pilot with a New York clinic or health system, and much, much more…
Tell us about the product or service that PatternMD offers.
PatternMD is a free, anonymous symptom-tracking platform for the space between doctor visits. People log what they feel — chronic pain, migraines, anxiety, panic, autoimmune flares, PTSD — and the app records the context around it automatically (weather, air quality, sleep and workouts from Apple Health or Health Connect), then surfaces the patterns that a 15-minute appointment never sees. Nothing requires a name, photo or identity; a PMD-ID is all anyone ever sees. It runs in English, Spanish, German and Vietnamese. When a patient chooses to share with a clinician, a one-tap visit summary and a provider portal let the two of them read each other in their own languages, live. A separate researcher module exposes only aggregate, consent-based signals, with the privacy rules enforced in the database itself. It is live on the App Store, Google Play and the web.
What inspired the start of PatternMD?
Long, frustrating nights with chronic back pain. By trade I’m a project manager who lives for data and organization, and I kept wishing there was a community of my people mapping the same real-world clues in real time — a place to log what I felt, see who else felt it, and start to understand what was actually happening in my body. So I built it, to be the detective I needed during those nights. The multilingual side came from home: my parents only speak Spanish, and I wanted them to be able to use it. Wilson Feliz, our Cofounder and CTO and a disabled U.S. Army veteran, built the app; Danisel Feliz, our Cofounder, who arrived from the Dominican Republic at 13 without English, made the multilingual design a requirement from day one.
How is it different?
Three things, and each is a design decision rather than a feature. First, anonymity is the default: there is no identity to leak, sell or subpoena, which is what lets people log the symptoms they would never type under their name. Second, it treats mental and physical health as one record — pain and sleep, panic and migraines — because that is how symptoms actually arrive. Third, language is built into the clinical relationship, not bolted on: a Spanish-speaking patient and an English-speaking doctor communicate through the portal without an interpreter. It is free with no premium tier, and the research side can only ever see groups, never people.
What market does PatternMD target and how big is it?
Adults managing recurring or chronic conditions, mental and physical, and the clinicians and researchers who serve them. Six in ten U.S. adults live with a chronic disease (CDC) and roughly one in five with a mental illness in a given year (NIMH). Our wedge is the part of that population the current tools fit worst: people who are not comfortable putting their health under their own name, and households where care happens across a language line — about 68 million U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home (Census Bureau), nearly half of New York City. Veterans are a second wedge: the app was accepted into the VA PathFinder Innovation Repository in May 2026.
What is the business model?
Free for patients, always, with no premium tier. Revenue comes from organizations rather than from the people using the app: sponsored placements from health organizations, sold on impressions and never targeted by identity, because there is none to target; and paid access for researchers and health systems to the aggregate, consent-based signals module. The provider portal is free to clinicians while we build density. We are also pursuing non-dilutive funding — our NIH SBIR application, a Direct-to-Phase-II proposal, is under scientific review at the National Institute of Mental Health, with a decision expected this fall.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
By being built for one already. We are bootstrapped, with a founding team of three and one engineer, near-zero fixed costs, and no paid acquisition — growth has come from press and word of mouth. The product is free, so a downturn does not change whether people can use it, and our revenue lines are sold to organizations, not consumers. The NIH SBIR path is non-dilutive if it comes through, and if it does not, nothing about the company’s survival depends on it.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
A decision on the NIH SBIR application this fall. TapBreath, our free companion breathing app, live on both stores. A first provider-portal pilot with a New York clinic or health system, where the live translation matters most. A first research partner on the aggregate signals module. Joining the VA’s VetResources Community Network. And a registered-user base several times today’s, driven by New York.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
That in health, the first thing you ship is not the product — it is the reason someone should trust you, and you have to design that before a single feature. We built anonymity in first and everything else around it.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
The leadership and language-access team at NYC Health + Hospitals. It is the largest public health system in the country and serves patients in more than 200 languages; a pilot of live patient-provider translation there would prove the model in the place it matters most.
Why did you launch in New York?
Because it is where the problem lives and where we are from. I was raised in the Bronx and Wilson was born in Brooklyn. Nearly half of this city speaks a language other than English at home, and the gap between a patient’s experience and what makes it into the exam room is widest here. New York also has the density of clinics, health systems, researchers and press that a product like this needs to prove itself.
