The Decision Log
You make more consequential decisions in a year of caregiving than most people make in a decade. Should you change schools. Try the new medication. Pursue the surgery, or wait. Drop a therapy that no longer seems to help. Each one feels enormous in the moment, and then life moves on and the reasoning fades. Six months later the question comes back around, and you cannot quite remember why you decided the way you did, who you talked to, or what you were weighing at the time. The decision stayed. The reasoning slipped away.
On this page
That lost reasoning matters. When the surgeon raises the option again, when the school year turns over, when someone asks "why did you stop that therapy," the answer you carefully arrived at the first time is exactly what you need. The Decision Log is the calm place to keep it.
It is not a form to fill out. It is a place to write down a real decision in human terms, once you have made it, so your past self can hand your future self the full picture. Everything you record stays on your own device — Decision Log entries are not part of care-circle sync — and nothing reports back. There is no required structure. Available
Recording a decision in plain language
Main Menu -> Team -> Decision Log -> + (Log a decision)
What belongs here is the significant stuff — a medication change, a school placement, a therapy you started or stopped, a surgery, an equipment authorization that came through or got denied. Things like started Trileptal 150mg, switched from ABA to floor-time, denied OT increase. Each entry becomes part of a trust record: months or even years later it stands as the plain account of what was decided and why, and that account is exactly what you reach for in an IEP meeting, a custody proceeding, or a re-evaluation — moments where reconstructing it from memory simply isn't possible.
When you log a decision, CareHaven asks for it the way you would actually explain it to a friend, not the way a form would demand it. You jot down the decision itself and when it was decided, and then each remaining part has a plain-language label.
What you weighed. The considerations, the options you were choosing between, the hopes and worries on each side. This is the heart of it, the part that fades fastest and matters most.
Who you consulted. The people you talked to before deciding, the doctor, the therapist, your partner, another parent who has been there.
Decided by. Who actually made the call. Sometimes that is you alone. Sometimes it is you and your partner together, or the whole care team in one conversation.
Revisit by. A date to look at this decision again, because care decisions are rarely forever. Bodies change, children grow, what was right last spring may be worth a fresh look by fall. To set one, toggle Set a date to revisit in the composer and pick a date.
Here is how that reads in practice. Say you decided to start a new seizure medication. What you weighed: the current med was holding most days but not the cluster nights, and the new one had a steadier track record but a rougher first two weeks. Who you consulted: the neurologist, and another parent in your group whose child took the same drug. Decided by: you and your partner. Revisit by: three months out, to see whether the cluster nights actually settled. Read back later, that is not a cryptic note. It is the whole story. Available
A quick tip: log it within about a day of deciding. While the choice is fresh, what you weighed comes out detailed and textured. The same decision written down a month later loses exactly the texture that made it worth keeping.
Worth revisiting
A decision you mean to look at again in three months has a way of quietly slipping past. You are busy. The calendar fills. The note sits in the app and nobody opens it.
That is what the revisit date is for. When the date you set arrives, CareHaven gently brings the decision back to you so the "let's reconsider this in three months" actually happens. It shows up on your Home screen as a soft card, A decision to revisit, one of the gentle briefing cards there. Tap it and the decision reopens, the full picture you wrote intact, ready for you to look again with fresh eyes. You can read more about that card and the rest of your briefing in The Home screen. Nothing nags. The card simply makes sure a thoughtful plan to reconsider does not silently expire. Available
How this differs from thinking it through
The Decision Log is for after you have decided. Its companion, Working through a care decision, is for before. That one is a set of neutral prompts that help you lay out a tangled choice and figure out the right questions to ask the people who can help. It never tells you what to choose. It just slows the decision down so you can see it clearly.
Think of the two as a pair. You work the choice through over there, and once you land on an answer, you record it here. You can move from one to the other whenever it helps, or use each on its own. They sit alongside your other planning tools, like the goals and the Communication Log in Advocacy & goals, as part of the bigger picture the Navigator summary keeps for you.
A note on plans
Recording a new decision and editing one you have already logged are part of the optional CareHaven Family plan. Reading and deleting decisions already in your log stays free, so nothing you have written is ever locked away from you. You can find the full breakdown on the Plans — Free, Plus, and Family page.
It stays with you
Your decisions are some of the most personal things you will ever write down. They stay private to you, in the same spirit as the rest of CareHaven — encrypted so only you can read them. No account is required to keep them. They are simply there, waiting, the next time a hard question comes back around.
Caregiving asks you to decide, again and again, often when you are tired and rarely with a clear right answer. The Decision Log cannot make those calls easier. What it can do is make sure that when you have done the hard work of deciding, that work is not lost, and that the right moment to look again does not pass you by.