Built for everyone: how Drew Clayborn is coding a lifeline for home care

As a solo developer, it seems daunting at first. You never know how something is going to come about. It might happen faster than you want, but just go with it. Don't be afraid to make something. And Supabase makes it easy to build quickly and ship.

Drew Clayborn is building General Home Health, a HIPAA-compliant home care charting app, by himself. A spinal cord injury left him paralyzed and on a ventilator as a teenager. He taught himself to code, filed a provisional patent, and is now turning paper charts and dated software into a real app for the nurses and agencies that most software companies never see.

Some products begin with a market. This one began earlier, with a teenager in Michigan whose life changed in a single moment. A spinal cord injury left Drew paralyzed and dependent on a ventilator. Three months and eleven days in the hospital. Since then, he has refused to let that moment define his next chapter. He finished a full AP schedule, went back to the marching band, and earned a spot at the University of Michigan, where he graduated in 2017. Drew is the director, inventor, and developer of the Drew Crew Charitable Organization, the nonprofit built around his recovery.

The challenge#

Drew receives 24/7 home care, so he sees the charting problem from the inside. A nurse who walks into a home for the first time often knows nothing about the patient, the family, or the care that is needed. That gap is dangerous for the patient and frightening for the nurse, whose license depends on getting compliance right.

A lot of nurses, when they go into a home, they're going into a situation that they've never been in. They've never met the family. They don't know how old they are, what issues they have. This app is supposed to be an easy solution so that when a nurse walks into a home, they can go straight to giving someone the best care they need and deserve.

The other half of the problem is money. Home care pay sources are not always consistent, and an agency only keeps its hours if the charting can justify them. Drew watched his own nurses, case managers, and supervisors fight the same quiet battle with software that worked against them, and he watched friends who run small agencies chart on paper. He set out to build a true home care solution, one that protects the nurse, keeps the agency compliant, and lets the patient stay home.

Why Supabase#

Drew chose Supabase because it made a serious healthcare app feel possible for a solo builder. It gave him a clear database, authentication, realtime syncing, audit logs, and a HIPAA-ready path without forcing him to build an entire backend team first. Supabase let Drew focus on the part that mattered most: creating a safer, simpler charting experience for nurses, agencies, and the patients who depend on them.

I'm not a full-time software engineer with a big team behind me. I'm someone who saw a problem in home care every single day and wanted to fix it. Supabase made the backend feel possible. It gave me the tools to build something real without getting buried in complexity, and it gave me the confidence that I could protect the information this app was built around.

Drew was also grateful that Supabase had a complete HIPAA solution. This is Drew's first HIPAA app, and the compliance wall is the part that usually requires a team, a budget, and a compliance department. Supabase's HIPAA support gave him audit logs of every login, logout, and charting action, which is what makes an agency auditable. Row Level Security let him lock down patient data from the start, and it let him monitor the system without seeing what he should not.

The fact that Supabase has a HIPAA-compliant aspect makes it so you can be audited. If you're an agency using this, you have complete audit logs of everybody logging in, logging out, who's charting what. It makes it really easy to monitor the database without seeing things I shouldn't necessarily see.

The solution#

Drew is not a career engineer. He studied informatics, then switched to math out of passion. As the tools got within reach, he taught himself to ship. He built the General Home Health client in Xcode for iPhone and iPad, since agencies typically issue Apple devices to their nurses. The app charts offline and syncs the moment it reconnects, so care never stops when a patient leaves the house.

The charting itself is built to be hard to get wrong. The app enforces live charting, so a nurse cannot accidentally future-date an entry or chart something incorrectly. It requires hourly narrative charting and a record of every medication, given or not, with the reason, which is what keeps an agency's hours defensible. A patient atlas shows the whole body at a glance, so a nurse knows what to watch before any hands-on care.

Under the app, Drew uses Supabase Database, Auth, Realtime, Row Level Security, Audit Logs, and the Table Editor. He is still early with the HIPAA features and is using the current testing period to find bugs before he scales to larger agencies.

The results#

What is already clear is the gap between General Home Health and what these caregivers use today.

• Live charting blocks future-dated and incorrect entries, so the agency does not have to chase nurses to fix mistakes after the fact.
• Hourly narrative and medication logging keep an agency's hours defensible to pay sources, which is the difference between getting paid and losing hours.
• The patient atlas gives a nurse a full-body view of lines, wounds, and conditions before hands-on care, reducing the risk of errors during routine tasks like turning a patient.
• Realtime keeps multiple caregivers on the same patient in sync and accurate at once.
• HIPAA audit logs of every login, logout, and charting action make an agency auditable.
• Supervisors can run visits virtually by monitoring charting in real time, without driving to the home.

A supervisor can do their visit virtually. They don't have to drive to the house, they don't have to be present. They can monitor everybody's charting and the care the patient is receiving because it's all in Supabase, reliably and in real-time.