The Project That Felt Too Big

I started MyUPP on June 6, 2026, with an idea that was either ambitious or wildly unreasonable. Depending on the hour, I still think it may be both.

The project is called Universal Provider Passport, or UPP. The basic idea is simple: a physician should not have to prove who they are, where they trained, what they are licensed to do, and whether they are qualified over and over again in a slow, repetitive process.

That process is called credentialing. In plain English, it is the checking and approving that happens before a doctor can work with a hospital, payer, or healthcare organization. From what I was building around, this can take 90 to 180 days.

Months.

That number stuck with me. Not because I had some polished business plan sitting on my desk. I did not. I am 50, not technical, and very much learning as I go. But I could understand the pain of a process that takes too long, involves too much repeated information, and sits between qualified people and the work they are trying to do.

So the question became: what if a provider had a kind of digital passport?

One place for the important information. One trusted profile. One way to help move the credentialing process from months to days.

That sounds tidy when I write it in a few sentences. It did not feel tidy when I began.

Very quickly, the idea became enormous. There was not just one user. There were providers, hospitals, payers, and credentialing specialists. Each group would need its own area. Each person would need to see only the information they were allowed to see. There would need to be sign-in, accounts, data storage, permission rules, and a real database behind it all.

For someone with no coding background, that is the part where my brain wanted to quietly leave the room.

I was building in Lovable, hoping the AI could help me do what I could not do alone. I did not expect it to magically understand healthcare or make every decision for me. What I hoped was more modest and more practical: help me turn a big idea into screens, structure, and working pieces.

I needed the AI to help me think like a builder. Not a software engineer. Not someone pretending to know more than I do. Just a person trying to take one next step.

At first, I had to shrink the dream. The full version of MyUPP was too much for a first build. A national physician credentialing platform with multiple portals is not exactly a beginner project. That sentence still makes me laugh a little, because who starts there?

Apparently, I do.

So I chose a first version. V1 would focus on the Provider Passport and the Credentialing Engine. In ordinary language, that means the provider profile and the part of the system that helps organize and move credentialing work forward.

I also wanted it to feel trustworthy from the start. Healthcare software cannot look cute or casual. I chose a visual direction I thought of as Clinical Trust: deep navy, medical teal, clean screens, and a serious tone. Not flashy. Not trendy. Calm and competent.

Some pieces were clearly for later. Document scanning and reading with OCR, which is the technology that pulls text from uploaded files, would wait. A marketing landing page would wait too. I had to stop myself from building the entire city before I had one working street.

Even with that smaller scope, it still felt huge. There was a real backend using Supabase, which is where the app stores and manages its data. There was email and password sign-in, plus Google sign-in. There was a multi-portal shell, meaning the beginning of separate spaces for different types of users.

Most days, I felt like I was holding a map upside down.

But I also felt something else: the AI made the first steps possible. It gave me a way to move from an idea in my head to something I could see, click through, question, and improve.

That is why I started MyUPP. Not because I knew how to build a healthcare-grade platform. I did not. I started because the problem felt real, the delay felt unnecessary, and for the first time I had a tool that made the impossible feel slightly less ridiculous.

Small takeaway: sometimes the first win is not building the whole thing. It is daring to make the idea visible.