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AfterCare turns hospital discharge paperwork into a structured recovery plan. These answers cover the most common questions about how it works, what it can and cannot do, and how your data is handled.
No. AfterCare explains the paperwork you already have — it does not diagnose you, recommend treatment, or replace your care team.Everything AfterCare shows you is traced directly to a specific line in your uploaded document. When AfterCare is not confident enough to present something as fact, it tells you to check the original paperwork instead of guessing. If a section of your discharge instructions could not be read reliably, that section appears empty rather than filled with invented information.If you have questions about your diagnosis, medications, or treatment, contact your doctor or care team.
AfterCare accepts:
  • PDF files — including digitally produced discharge documents from hospital systems.
  • Photos of pages — JPEG or PNG images of printed paperwork work well, provided the text is legible and the image is reasonably in focus.
AfterCare automatically detects whether your PDF contains a real text layer or is a scanned image. Documents with a real text layer are processed directly; scans and photos are transcribed using vision AI before extraction begins. You do not need to convert files before uploading.
AfterCare is built to degrade gracefully — a problem in one section of your document does not break the whole guide.The processing pipeline has eight independent stages (OCR, extraction, medications, appointments, warnings, timeline, explanation, and quality checking). If one stage encounters an unreadable section — for example, a medication table that is too blurry to parse — that section comes back empty and reports an error for that stage only. Your appointments, warnings, and timeline are unaffected.You will always get a guide. Some sections may be empty if AfterCare could not read them reliably, but you will never see a broken or crashed screen because of a difficult document.
Yes. AfterCare runs in Local mode automatically when no account or cloud service is configured. In Local mode:
  • No sign-in is required.
  • Your documents and recovery guide are stored entirely in your browser.
  • Nothing is sent to a server.
The trade-off is that your data does not sync to other devices or browsers. If you want to view your guide on your phone and your tablet, or share it with a caregiver, you will need an account. See Offline Mode for a full explanation of all three modes.
Yes. Every document you upload is encrypted before it is stored, using AES-256-GCM — a military-grade encryption standard used across healthcare and finance. Each document is encrypted separately, so even two identical files produce completely different encrypted data in storage.Additionally, AfterCare automatically detects duplicate uploads so the same document is never stored or processed twice. Access to your data is recorded in an audit log that captures what was accessed and when, without ever recording the contents of your document.For full details, see Data & Privacy.
Yes — if you add them to your care circle. AfterCare supports caregiver access for exactly this situation: a family member or friend who is helping manage your recovery at home.A caregiver in your care circle can view your recovery guide, your medication schedule, and your upcoming appointments. They cannot modify your data or upload documents on your behalf unless you grant that permission.Care circle management is available in Full mode (when the AfterCare service is connected). In Local mode, data stays on a single device and cannot be shared.
It means AfterCare found something that looked like a medication in your document, but was not confident enough in the reading to present it as a confirmed fact.Every piece of information AfterCare extracts carries a confidence score from 0 to 100. When the score falls below a safe threshold — because the text was unclear, the phrasing was ambiguous, or the cited lines could not be verified in the original document — AfterCare shows a “low confidence” label and tells you to check the original paperwork.This is intentional. AfterCare never invents a dose or drug name and presents it as certain. A low-confidence item is a prompt for you to look at the relevant page of your discharge document and confirm the detail with your pharmacist or care team.
AfterCare’s processing service runs on free-tier hosting that sleeps when it has not been used for a while — typically after about 15 minutes of inactivity. When you make the first request after an idle period, the service needs to wake up before it can respond. This can take anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds.AfterCare handles this automatically:
  1. At startup, it tries to reach the service with a short timeout so the page loads quickly.
  2. If the service does not respond in time, AfterCare starts in a lower mode (Sync or Local) and quietly keeps trying in the background.
  3. When the service wakes up and responds, AfterCare upgrades to Full mode on its own — no page reload needed.
If you see the status Saved on this device when you expected to be connected, wait a minute or two. The app will update itself.