Why I built Proactive

Hi, I’m Saqib, the founder of Proactive.

After eight years living with a chronic stomach illness, I finally feel like myself again. Eight years is a long time, so I’ll keep the story short.

My journey involved several approaches to care. A turning point came when a chiropractor visited my mum’s workplace to give a talk. She asked whether chiropractic care might help her son. That introduction became part of my recovery journey, and I still go for regular care today.

Along the way, I also worked with practitioners in functional medicine, Chinese medicine and kinesiology. Each approached my care differently, but they kept coming back to the same point: lifestyle—what I did between appointments—was one of the most important parts of getting better and staying well.

Yet this was also the part that was hardest to follow up on. Recommendations might arrive in an email or be explained during an appointment, but recording what I’d done and how I’d felt often came down to memory.

I often had no simple way to bring those recommendations together, record how things went and share that picture at my next visit. When someone asked how the previous few weeks had been, remembering meals, symptoms, energy and everything else accurately wasn’t easy.

That’s where the idea for Proactive came from.

Proactive gives practitioners a way to turn their recommendations into a plan patients can use day to day. That might mean an action to complete, a food diary to keep or information to record. Patients can follow their plan, add notes and check in before their next appointment.

The practitioner can then review those entries alongside completion and the patient’s own account of how they’re doing.

My hypothesis is simple: making recommendations easier to follow, and giving practitioners a clearer picture of what happens between appointments, could help patients achieve better health outcomes sooner. Looking back at my own eight-year journey, I believe that kind of support would have helped me.

I’m building Proactive from my experience as a patient, with the aim of making it useful to both sides of that conversation.