Lotsa Helping Hands is built for the community around a medical event — mobilizing neighbors, friends, and volunteers to deliver meals, give rides, and handle tasks when a family is managing a serious illness or recovery. It's a genuinely different tool from a health records app. Family Stork builds the actual medical record: every clinic, lab, and hospital emails records to a private @familystork address, and they file automatically into a lifelong health timeline. Every person gets one health story, and one private Family Stork email address every clinic already knows how to use.
When a parent is diagnosed with something serious or recovering from surgery, two things need to happen at once. Friends and family need to know how to help — meals, rides, lawn care, someone to sit with the kids. And the medical record needs to be organized — every specialist's notes, every lab panel, every discharge instruction, the medication list that seems to change after every appointment.
Lotsa Helping Hands handles the first problem beautifully. You create a care community, post updates, and let volunteers sign up for tasks. The burden of coordinating "who's bringing dinner Tuesday" moves off the caregiver and onto a shared calendar that the whole support community manages. That's a real, meaningful thing to do for a family in crisis.
Family Stork handles the second problem. Your family member's @familystork address is a standard email. Every doctor sends the visit summary there. Every lab sends results. The hospital sends discharge papers. The specialist who saw them once sends the consultation letter. All of it files into a searchable health timeline — organized by category, by date, by who sent it. When the next doctor asks what happened, the record answers. Tired of managing health records for yourself and everyone you love? Family Stork organizes them for you automatically.
| Feature | Lotsa Helping Hands | Family Stork |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Coordinate community volunteers for care tasks — meals, rides, and support around a medical event | Build and maintain a lifelong health record from clinic emails — automatically, for the whole family |
| Health record storage | Not a health records app — Lotsa Helping Hands focuses on care coordination, not medical documentation | Complete health record — visits, labs, vaccines, allergies, medications, discharge papers — from clinic emails |
| Volunteer coordination | Core feature — sign-up calendar for tasks, meal coordination, task tracking for community volunteers | Not a volunteer coordination tool — Family Stork holds the medical record, not the care calendar |
| Community updates | Announcements and well wishes — post updates for the whole support community to see | Family access to the health record — siblings and family members can be granted access to the timeline |
| Clinic record intake | Not designed for clinical record intake — community coordination, not medical documentation | Clinics send records directly to the @familystork address — records file automatically, nothing to upload |
| Long-term record | Designed for a specific medical event or period of need — not a lifelong health record | Lifelong — from birth through adulthood; the record follows the person everywhere they receive care |
| New parents | Lotsa serves new parents too — let friends sign up to help with meals and tasks after a birth | Family Stork starts at birth — first-year schedule, checkups, vaccines, milestones — building the health story from day one |
| Pricing | Free; check lotsahelpinghands.com for current plan details | $99/year — or about $10/month |
A parent gets a diagnosis. The support network springs into action — meals are scheduled, rides are arranged, the church group and the neighbors are signed up on the Lotsa calendar. That part is running. But then come the follow-up appointments, the specialist referrals, the imaging results, the second opinion. The records from the last hospitalization that nobody filed. The medication list that changed twice since the diagnosis. The discharge papers from the ER visit that got stacked on the kitchen counter.
Family Stork holds that side of things. Your parent's @familystork address is on their record in the app. Every doctor — the oncologist, the internist, the cardiologist — sends the visit summary there directly. The records build into a searchable timeline. When the second-opinion specialist asks for the full history, you have it organized. When a sibling who lives across the country asks what the last lab panel showed, the answer is in the record — not in someone's memory of a phone call after the appointment.
The care community handles the logistics of getting through a hard stretch. The health record handles what every doctor needs to know. Both matter. They're different tools for different jobs.
Every person gets one health story, and one private Family Stork email address every clinic already knows how to use.
Start your family's timeline →$99/year · or about $10/month · From your first heartbeat and beyond.
Lotsa Helping Hands is a care coordination tool for community volunteers — it's built for meal coordination, task scheduling, and keeping the support network organized. It's not designed to store or organize clinical health records from doctors and hospitals. For the medical record itself — visit notes, lab results, discharge papers — Family Stork holds that automatically from what clinics send to your family member's @familystork address.
Each family member has one @familystork address — the address shown on their record in the app. Every doctor and specialist they see can send records to that address directly. The cardiologist. The oncologist. The internist. The hospital after discharge. All of it arrives at the same address and files into the same searchable timeline. For more on gathering records from every doctor, see how to gather medical records from every doctor.
No. The @familystork address is a standard email address — the same one any clinic already knows how to send email. There's no integration required, no new system for the clinic to learn, and nothing to install. Ask your parent's doctors and specialists to send visit summaries and results to the address shown on the record after each appointment.
Yes — they solve entirely different problems. Lotsa Helping Hands coordinates the community support around a medical event; Family Stork holds the clinical record that every doctor needs. Many families managing a serious illness use a community coordination tool for the immediate support logistics and a health record app for the ongoing clinical documentation. They complement rather than compete.
Yes. Family Stork holds a lifelong health record for every person — children from birth and adults at any age. An aging parent gets their own private @familystork address. Every doctor and specialist sends records there directly, and all of it builds into one searchable timeline. Siblings can be given access to a parent's record. For more, visit Family Stork for caregivers of aging parents.
Last verified: September 2026