I'm a general surgery resident. I built Tomo because I couldn't keep doing what I was doing.
By PGY-3 I had a notebook full of half-finished entries. I'd been taught by genuinely great surgeons, in genuinely great moments. Mid-case, hands in the same wound as mine, telling me why this stitch, this plane, this retractor. I understood it completely while it was happening. And then it faded. By the time I scrubbed out, charted, ran to the next case, and finally sat down hours later, the moment had gone blurry at the edges. What had been perfectly clear in the OR was now something I was reconstructing from memory, getting most of it but losing the part that made it click.
What I wanted was a tool that would meet me at the busiest possible moment to take a note, and take it for me anyway. Press a button. Talk for thirty seconds. Walk to the next room. By the end of residency, have something nobody else has — a synthesis of every operation I've ever done, in my own voice, organized by procedure and by attending and by the year I learned it.
It is, in the most literal sense, a gift to your future self. You always thank your past self for taking good notes. On a brutal day that almost never happens. Tomo makes it the default.
I built this because I needed it. Turns out I'm not the only one.
— R.S.PGY-4 · founder · still on service