When you enter the headquarters of Anil Sethi’s Silicon Valley startup, you’re welcomed by a painting of a free-spirited woman. The person depicted in the picture is his little sister Tania.

Tania lost her battle with breast cancer when she was 46. 

But her fight and the struggles that Sethi lived through inspired him to develop a company that could tackle the nightmare of communicating one’s health history from one doctor to the next, one medical centre to the next.

“Tania was always more spirit than flesh,” Sethi told CBS News.

When she was 46 years old, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center gave Tania two weeks to live.

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Reminiscing the memories, Sethi narrated, “she always thought she could beat this. She tried a bunch of different kinds of therapies.”

Sethi ventured on the tragic journey along with Tania. 

“While I was following her around during her treatment in that last year, she was seen at a ton of places, and that means she left a breadcrumb trail of her medical information behind her wherever she went. And it just is fragmented,” Sethi recalled.

“Health care is still using a lot of fax and pagers, and this is the 21st century,” said Sethi, according to CBS News. 

During the time he took a leave from Apple, which had recently acquired his health care company, he noticed some things in how medical information was shared.

Simplifying what his company does,  Sethi said, “What I do is electronic health records.”  

After months of struggle, Tania would lose her battle to cancer. 

“She was telling me, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She goes, after I die. And I said, ‘Look, I don’t know.’ And she said, ‘Well, here’s what you’re not going to, you’re not going to retire, and you’re not going to take a sabbatical, and you’re not going to go to the beach.’ And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ And I know that was the initial motivation for Tania to push me to do this work,” Sethi said.

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To fulfil his sister’s last wish, which was for him to use his experience to help everyday citizens cut through a bogged-down medical bureaucracy, Sethi founded “Ciitizen.”

It’s an online system for patients to upload and digitally house their medical records. The service is free to all patients.  

Ciitizen is now in its third year, and Sethi is inspired by an unrepeatable slogan to beat cancer that he found under his sister’s artwork. Patients with cancer are the beginning point, but he is committed to offering every citizen, sick or not, their own particular area for their medical information, and to link those who are sick to trials. 

“When Tania died, I saw what happened in her medical records. And all the good stuff is in the clinical notes. And that isn’t available. And I know how to get that. So a lot of jigsaw puzzle pieces fell together, and it just made sense,” Sethi said.