From Neopets to cardiology
My coding started in the most unserious place possible. I was a kid in a Neopets guild who wanted a nicer website for us, so I taught myself HTML one tag at a time, figuring out what <img> and <a href> actually did. I kept tinkering over the years, never formally, mostly for fun. JournalJams is where that old hobby and my medicine finally came together.
It started in journal club
I was sitting in a journal club during my fellowship while someone presented a study, and honeslty, I felt pretty lost. I just wanted a clear overview of the whole thing: what it found, what it means, where it came from, and the questions worth asking about it. I couldn't find anything that gave me that the way I had it in my head, so I started building it myself.
I built it piece by piece
I designed it, wrote the code, and built the reasoning and research infrastructure behind it, across both the website and the iPhone app that's now on the App Store. (I had a lot of help from AI along the way, so genuine thanks to Claude.) I'm not a trained engineer, so I learned each part as I went, usually late at night and on golden weekends during fellowship. A lot of that time went into testing. I ran the same papers through over and over, making sure the analysis actually held up at each level, from a medical student all the way to a guidelines committee member.
What it does, and why you can trust it
Search any trial, drug, author, or question, or drop in a PDF, and JournalJams finds the actual published paper and works from its full text, not a guess. It's powered by Google's Gemini together with live search, so it reads the real, curent literature instead of leaning on a fixed training cutoff. You get back a clean, organized brief: the key findings and statistics, the study design in PICO form, the limitations, and the historical and clinical context that shows where a study came from and what it changed. Every analysis links back to the source publication so you can check it yourself. Then it raises the kind of discussion questions a sharp room would ask, written at seven different levels, from medical student to attending to journal editor to guidelines committee member, so you can look at one paper through every lens at the table. You can also set "My Perspective" once, telling it your role and focus, and every brief will tell you whether and how that study should change your own practice.
Why not just use ChatGPT or OpenEvidence?
They're genuinely great tools, and I use them too. Real props to them. But they're built to answer broadly. JournalJams is built to do one thing all the way, which is to give you a full, structured, source grounded understanding of a single study, fast. That focus is the whole point.
How people use it
People tell me they pull it up while walking down the hall, in journal club, on rounds, prepping their own presentation, getting up to speed before research, or just when they're reading an article and want to understand it more deeply. The multi level questions tend to be the part that suprises people. A few things I've heard:
I learn so much more from the questions than from just reading the abstract.
a medical studentIt saved me so many follow up searches.
an internal medicine residentIt makes me actually like looking up articles. It takes away the steep learning curve of figuring out what's going on.
a surgical fellow
The idea underneath it
Medical articles and research can feel pretty dry, especially as a trainee. And honestly, my generation doesn't really learn from textbooks anymore. We learn by doing questions. That's how we think, how we study, how things actually stick. So a big part of JournalJams is built around that, turning a single paper into the questions worth asking about it. The real bottleneck in medicine isn't getting to information, we're drowning in it. It's having the time and the structure to actually understand it. I built this for the next trainee who feels lost in journal club the way I did. Knowledge is power, and it feels good to finally understand what a study is really saying.
Questions, ideas, or just want to say hello? Contact@JournalJams.org · @JournalJamsApp