Why I Built KidneyKind

"There are over 800,000 Americans on dialysis right now. And most of us are managing our care with a mix of paper logs, spreadsheets, and memory. We deserve better."

Who I Am

I'm Mike McGarry. I grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and I've been living in South Florida since 2011. By day I'm a Systems Engineer at an IT company focused on the healthcare industry — a career that wandered through helpdesk, system administration, security administration, and infrastructure work before landing where it is now. I went to college for software development and couldn't find an entry-level dev job out of school, so I fell sideways into IT and built a career there instead.

But I've been writing code as a hobby since I was three years old, typing BASIC into a Commodore 64. Visual Basic, Java, HTML, JavaScript, C, C++, Objective-C — coding has been the one constant since childhood. I just never imagined the project that would finally pull me back to it would be an app for managing my own kidney failure.

Polycystic Kidney Disease runs in my family. My grandfather had it. My mother had it. Several of my mother's sisters wound up on dialysis. I'm the next generation up.

The Diagnosis

Polycystic Kidney Disease isn't supposed to be the kind of diagnosis you get overnight. For most people it builds slowly — you learn it runs in the family, you get the genetic test, you watch the numbers creep in the wrong direction over years of appointments.

Mine was overnight. January 4, 2022. I was 36 years old. I went to the ER for stomach pain that wouldn't quit, got some imaging done, and walked out with end-stage renal disease and 5% kidney function. No prior diagnosis. No genetic test. No years of warning. Just imaging that showed two kidneys the size of footballs and a doctor explaining what the next steps were going to be.

Looking back, the symptoms had been there since I was about four years old. I'd been dismissed for years — growing pains, just a kid who didn't want to go to school, nothing worth testing for. Nobody connected the dots. The PKD diagnosis at 36 felt sudden, but the disease had been with me for three decades. The medical system just hadn't been paying attention.

That conversation in the ER changed everything. Suddenly you're in a world of new vocabulary — PD vs HD, Kt/V, ultrafiltration, phosphorus binders, EPO. A world your phone's health app wasn't built for.

Starting Peritoneal Dialysis

I started in-clinic hemodialysis right away — three times a week, 4.5 hours a session, sitting in a chair with my laptop trying to keep working through it. I did that for almost a year. By November 2022 I'd transitioned to peritoneal dialysis at home, which fits my life much better. I can do it on my own schedule, manage it around my full-time remote job, sleep through most of it on the cycler. But home dialysis comes with its own complexity. Manual exchanges, cycler sessions, fluid tracking, watching drain appearance, recording weights before and after.

I tried to track it in Apple Health. I tried spreadsheets. I tried paper logs. None of it worked — they were either too generic, too tedious, or couldn't capture the specific fields that actually matter for dialysis patients.

"I wanted an app that understood what a 'manual exchange' was. That knew UF = drain minus fill. That let me note drain appearance and actually understood why that matters."

Building the App I Needed

What finally pushed me from "I wish this app existed" to "I'm building it" was wrestling with the existing tools. My dialysis provider's patient apps. Multiple transplant center portals — each one a separate login, a different layout, a different quirk, none of them designed by someone who actually had to live with the disease. I'd been working in healthcare IT since 2017, watching enterprise health software get built without the patient in mind. I knew it could be better.

And thanks to my cousin Dane — a phone call with him reignited my love of coding after a long gap. That conversation landed at the right moment.

So I built it. KidneyKind started as a simple session log. Then I added vitals. Then medication reminders — because dialysis patients are typically on 8–15 medications and missing a phosphorus binder matters. Then lab tracking, because watching your potassium trend between appointments gives you something real to talk about with your nephrologist.

The name came from a simple idea: that kidney patients deserve technology that's kind to them. Thoughtful. Built around how they actually live, not how a developer imagines they live. The design philosophy is inspired by Steve Jobs's framing — the best user experience comes from making everything as simple as possible. For an audience of low-energy dialysis patients, simplicity isn't an aesthetic. It's accessibility.

The Transplant Journey

I'm working through the kidney transplant evaluation process — the extensive medical workup required before you can be placed on the national waitlist through UNOS. I'm currently on my third transplant center. The process has been hard for reasons that have nothing to do with the medicine. I live alone. I work full-time remote. I'm on the cycler ten hours every night and do two manual exchanges during the day. Threading workup appointments — cardiology clearance, surgical consultations, social work, financial review, infectious disease screens, and on and on — through a schedule that's already 12 hours a day of dialysis takes the kind of energy I rarely have.

That experience — and the lack of a clear, plain-language guide to what's ahead — is why KidneyKind includes a transplant resources section and the full Transplant Journey tracker. Because when I started, I didn't know what I didn't know.

Where the App Is Today

KidneyKind has come a long way from that first session log. The core is in place: dialysis session tracking for all four modalities, daily vitals, lab results with automatic out-of-range flagging, medication reminders, and a Home dashboard that pulls everything together. The Explore tab has a curated kidney health news feed from regional sources and a daily Recipe of the Day backed by 50+ kidney-friendly recipes from DaVita and the American Kidney Fund's Kidney Kitchen.

As of May 2026, KidneyKind is on the App Store in six countries: the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Japan. The app adapts to each region — lab units (mg/dL or SI), transplant pathway (UNOS in the US, the Canadian Transplant Registry administered by Canadian Blood Services, NHSBT in the UK, the National Kidney Transplant Service at Beaumont Hospital in Ireland, OrganMatch via DonateLife in Australia, and the Japan Organ Transplant Network in Japan), and country-specific kidney foundations and news sources. Same core app, locally accurate clinical and regulatory framing. Japan currently ships with an English UI plus Japan-aware content and regulatory framing; full Japanese UI localization is the next planned milestone.

KidneyKind is offered as a subscription with a 14-day free trial — Monthly, Quarterly, 6-Month, and Annual tiers, all unlocking the same features. Cancel anytime in the App Store. Whatever you've entered into the app stays yours regardless of subscription status — your data lives in your private iCloud, not on our servers.

More recently I added Appointments and a recurring clinic hemodialysis schedule that mirrors into the iOS Calendar so caregivers can see treatment days too, a Light/Dark mode toggle, trend charts for every numeric vital and lab analyte — because for kidney patients, the trend over weeks and months is the story — a Resources & Foundations hub with curated links to all the major US kidney organizations plus a plain-language guide to the kidney transplant evaluation process, and a Doctor Visit Summary PDF export that turns the whole pile of logged data into a clean, printable report you can hand to your nephrologist.

The biggest recent addition is Apple Health integration. KidneyKind now reads blood pressure, weight, pulse, and body temperature from Apple Health on every launch and merges them straight into your daily vitals, so anything your Withings scale, Omron cuff, or Apple Watch writes shows up automatically — no more typing. It also writes manually-entered vitals back so other apps see the same numbers, and five common dialysis symptoms (fatigue, nausea, headache, dizziness, shortness of breath) sync bidirectionally with HealthKit's symptom catalog. The whole thing is opt-in, granular per data type, and all the round-trips are deduplicated so the trend charts stay clean. I also rebuilt the PD Cycler log form to match how patients actually run the cycler — cycles and bag count are now separate fields, you can mix bag strengths within a session (e.g. 2× green + 1× red), and the optional last-fill section auto-defaults to whatever solution you're using on the cycler. And I added a Care Team directory so your nephrologist, PD nurse, dietician, and family caregivers are all reachable from one place with one-tap call, email, and directions — optionally mirrored to iOS Contacts.

The most recent big addition is a full Transplant Journey tracker. Nothing on the market does this. Generic health apps don't know what HLA typing, cPRA, or a transplant selection committee are. Transplant center portals are locked to one hospital and vanish the moment you leave the building. KidneyKind's tracker is built around the real patient arc — from referral, through 6+ months of evaluation workup, committee review, listing, waiting, and beyond. It ships with a seeded 30-item standard evaluation checklist across 8 clinical categories (consultations, bloodwork, imaging, cardiac, cancer screens, dental, psychosocial, financial), a key-dates timeline that includes the wait-time start date that actually counts for UNOS waitlist position (not the listing date itself), a PRA/cPRA trend chart for the single most important number to watch once you're listed, and one-tap call/email to your transplant coordinator straight from the status card. I built it because I needed it myself, and because the 3-ring binder I was handed at my first transplant clinic visit is not how a dialysis patient should be tracking 30 medical workup items while exhausted.

Right after that, I added Home Screen widgets. Four of them — a fluid intake gauge, a next medication dose tile, a next appointment card, and a large combined dashboard that shows all three plus your current transplant phase. Widgets exist because dialysis patients are often low on energy, and the last thing anyone in this situation should have to do is unlock their phone, find the app, and tap through screens just to see how much fluid they have left for the day. Now the information that matters is one glance away — on your Home Screen, your Lock Screen, or pinned to the Today View. The widgets update live within seconds of logging a vital or taking a dose (no 30-minute delay), and tapping any widget deep-links you straight to the right tab in the app.

The most recent batch of additions are all about reducing daily friction: fluid intake quick-add (one tap on the Home gauge logs a cup or bottle with timestamped history and tap-to-remove), a Share Health Update PDF for texting family and doctors a one-page snapshot between visits, a gentle morning cycler reminder for PD Cycler users ("whenever you have a moment, no rush"), and a proper patient profile with name, preferred name, sex, and date of birth — the Home dashboard now greets you personally ("Good afternoon, Mike"), the Visit Summary PDF has a proper patient identification block, and hemoglobin and creatinine lab ranges are now sex-aware where it's clinically meaningful.

Even more recently I added the things I needed for my own nightly cycler routine: a pre-session checklist that runs through hand washing, mask, exit site care, medications, and the cycler program before bedtime and creates a draft session with everything pre-filled, so finishing in the morning is just adding total UF and any alarms; structured symptom tracking with a 1–5 severity slider and trigger tags (after a meal, dehydration, missed dialysis, etc.) plus a frequency chart so patterns emerge over time; Kt/V dialysis adequacy tracking for patients getting quarterly clearance studies (KDOQI ≥ 1.7 for PD, ≥ 1.4 per session for HD); and three new long-form patient education guides joining the existing transplant guide — Dialysis Basics, Fluid Management, and Understanding Your Lab Results, all written in plain language for low-energy dialysis patients. The HD session forms also now respect the kg/lbs unit preference, the news feed actually filters for kidney content (no more Ozempic articles), and there's an accessibility pass plus haptic feedback on dose and vital saves.

A real Apple Watch companion — not a notification mirror, but an actual app with three views syncing in real-time with the iPhone via private iCloud. Quick-add fluid buttons (+ Cup, + Bottle, + Glass) for one-tap logging from the wrist with haptic confirmation, today's medication doses with tap-to-mark-taken, and a vitals snapshot with the latest BP and weight. Plus two watch face complications — a Fluid Intake gauge ring and a Next Medication Dose tile, both supporting Circular, Rectangular, and Inline families. The Fluid complication is interactive: tap it on your watch face to log a Cup without opening the app. Drops sync to the iPhone within seconds. Built because I needed it myself for my nightly cycler routine — being able to log a sip of water without having to find my phone in the dark.

What's Next

The next things on my list are importing labs straight from Apple Health Records so a connected Quest, LabCorp, or hospital MyChart account auto-fills your lab fields instead of forcing you to type them, ongoing polish across the existing features driven by patient feedback, and continuing to expand internationally as the app builds an audience. I'm also working toward making KidneyKind eligible for HSA/FSA reimbursement so patients can use their pre-tax health dollars to cover it.

If you take one thing from this page, do three things: download the app, let someone you know who's on dialysis know about it, and send me your feedback. KidneyKind is being built by the community it serves, and the only way it gets better is if the people living with this disease tell me what's missing.