Most migraine apps serve one reason to track, not all seven.
Insurance, disability, trials, triggers, treatment, appointment prep, awareness: each reason demands a different data shape, and most apps build for the easiest.
A year of data, useless in thirty seconds
The export finished, and the file was useless. A year of daily logging, and what came out was a grid of colored dots: red for bad days, yellow for medium, a date stamp and nothing else. The appeal needed something a claims reviewer could read in thirty seconds. Which preventives had been tried. When each was started and stopped. How many migraine days happened before and after. The app had recorded none of it, because the app was never asked to. It was built to spot a pattern in chocolate and red wine, not to argue with an insurer.
The seven-jobs problem
People say they track migraine. They almost never mean the same thing by it. Behind that one verb sit seven distinct jobs, and each wants a different shape of data. Proving a drug failed for prior authorization is a documentation job. Qualifying for a clinical trial is a baseline-diary job. Spotting your own triggers is a correlation job. From the outside they look identical, a person tapping a phone after a bad morning. The output each needs is so different that an app excellent at one can be worthless at another. The trouble starts when an app assumes all seven are the same job.
Why most apps optimize for the easy one
Trigger-hunting is the job almost every migraine app is built around, and it is the most forgiving of the seven. It rewards constant logging, lots of fields, colorful correlation charts, the engagement loop that keeps an app open. It also happens to be the job with the lowest stakes when it gets the data shape wrong. Nobody audits your trigger guesses. An insurer audits your prior-auth packet. A disability examiner audits your functional record. By designing for the reason that tolerates messy data, apps quietly fail the reasons that do not.
What each reason actually needs
Line the seven up against what apps deliver and the gaps are specific, not vague. The high-stakes reasons share one requirement the engagement-driven ones skip: structured, dated, exportable records a stranger can act on. Insurers want medication trial histories. Disability examiners want functional impact over time, the kind validated instruments like MIDAS and HIT-6 are built to capture. Trial coordinators want a clean baseline diary, often around 28 days, in a format they accept. Most apps give you a beautiful private dashboard and a CSV of dots.
Reason you track
What most apps do well
Where they fall short
Insurance prior-auth (CGRP, gepants)
Daily headache logging, frequency counts
Dated medication trial-and-failure history an insurer can read
Disability / FMLA claims
Long-running calendars
Functional-impact records (MIDAS, HIT-6), work hours lost over time
Clinical trial enrollment
Daily symptom capture
A clean baseline diary that separates migraine days from headache days
Trigger identification
Rich fields, correlation charts
Honest handling of premonitory symptoms misread as triggers
A concise printable of the interval's pattern, including the after-phase
Personal awareness
Charts, reflection prompts
The recovery days after the pain, where function is still gone
A category-level pattern across mainstream migraine trackers, not any single product.
Migraine days are not headache days
Nearly every high-stakes use of your data turns on this distinction. A migraine day meets specific symptom criteria under the ICHD-3 classification; a headache day is any day with head pain. CGRP efficacy, trial baselines, and prior-auth math are all counted in migraine days. An app that logs only 'headache: yes' cannot produce the number that matters.
What a prior-auth packet actually demands
Picture the most common high-stakes case: getting a CGRP preventive covered. In 2024 the American Headache Society issued a position statement arguing these treatments should be available first-line AHS 2024 position statement designates CGRP-targeting therapies as first-line for migraine prevention and states initiation should not require prior trial. ([source](https://www.migrainedisorders.org/ahs-statement-cgrp/)), yet most commercial plans still gate them behind documented trials of older preventive classes. So the packet a neurologist submits has to show specific things. Which preventives were tried, the dose, the dates, why each was stopped. The monthly migraine-day count before treatment, to establish a baseline. None of that is a colored dot. It is a structured record kept over months, exported in a form a busy clinic can paste into a prior-auth form. The patients who get approved on the first pass are usually the ones whose data was already in that shape. The ones who get denied often have the same migraine history, just unrecorded in any usable way.
Pick the app by your reason, not its chart
The practical move runs backwards from how most people choose. Instead of picking the prettiest tracker and hoping it serves whatever you need later, start with your actual reason and ask what data shape it demands. Heading into a prior-auth fight, you need export and medication history, and the chart barely matters. Trying to learn your own patterns, the after-phase matters more than the trigger field. Two requirements cut across all seven reasons, and almost no app gets both right: the record has to outlast the headache itself, and it has to be portable enough to leave the app the day you need it elsewhere.
The data has to survive the headache, and survive the app.
Where the after-phase fits in
We built Postdrome around the part of the timeline most trackers drop: the hours and days after the pain lifts, when function still has not come back. That choice serves more than personal awareness. A continuous symptom timeline, recorded through the recovery window and not stopped at headache-end, is the same structured, dated record the high-stakes reasons need. It exports clean, so the disability examiner or the prior-auth form gets something readable. It stays on your device, because health data this detailed should not be anyone else's asset. And it is a one-time purchase, because the people who need this most have already paid enough to insurers and pharmacies. The seven reasons do not need seven apps. They need one that respects how the data will actually be used.
What we're watching
Two shifts in how the system treats patient-recorded data are worth watching. Insurers are slowly standardizing what they accept for CGRP and gepant prior-auth, which would make exportable structured data even more decisive than it already is. And on the disability side, patient-recorded symptom records are starting to carry more weight as evidence. Both trends reward the same thing: records kept in a shape a stranger can act on, not a dashboard that looks good and proves nothing.
Track the whole arc, after-phase included, and take the data with you when an insurer, examiner, or neurologist needs it.
Postdrome records the full symptom timeline through the recovery window after the pain, then exports it clean. It is built by people who watched the apps fail someone they love, kept on-device, and sold once rather than rented.
