Jimenez Julien, the person behind LatchDesk

Why I built software for lactation consultants

I am Jimenez Julien. I run MLJ, SASU, a small software publisher, and LatchDesk is the product I spend most of my working week on. I did not come to this trade through a hospital or through a clinical training program. I came to it the way most software people should: by watching one person do a difficult job well, and noticing how much of her day the job itself was not paying for.

The person was an IBCLC in private practice who drove between four and six home visits a day across a metropolitan area. She was excellent in the room. She read a latch in seconds, she calmed a frightened first time mother without ever sounding like she was managing her, and she left families steadier than she found them. Then she went home, opened a laptop at nine at night, and rewrote from memory what she had already written by hand on a clipboard. That second shift was three to six hours a week, every week, and none of it was billable.

What struck me was that the existing options were all wrong in the same direction. Hospital charting systems assume a building, a network, a records department and a budget. Generic appointment tools assume the value of a visit is the booking. Neither one understands that in this trade the deliverable is a written plan a frightened parent can follow at three in the morning, and that the plan is worth very little if it arrives two days later by email.

So LatchDesk was built backward from that plan. Charting, weight capture, milk transfer math and template wording all exist to produce one thing: a document the family holds before the consultant reaches the car, and a chart that is already complete and signed when the door closes.

What I learned about this trade

Three things changed how I build. First, consultants do not want fewer fields, they want the right fields. Early on I stripped a template down to look clean and the consultants testing it added everything back by hand, because oral assessment findings and maternal pain scores matter later even when they feel repetitive now. Second, offline is not a nice extra. Home visits happen in basements, in back bedrooms of old houses, in apartments with one bar of signal. A tool that needs a connection to save a weight is a tool that loses a weight. Third, the parent facing copy is clinical work in itself. Consultants rewrite our suggested wording constantly, and they should, because the phrasing that reassures one mother frightens another.

I also learned to stop guessing about billing. Superbills, CPT codes, NPI fields and insurance reimbursement are where a good visit turns into an unpaid argument, and I had to sit with practice owners and their bookkeepers for weeks before the export was worth anything.

Experience and expertise

I have spent more than a decade building and shipping small web products, most of them for independent operators rather than enterprises: people who own the business, do the work, and carry the consequences of a bad tool personally. That is a specific discipline. It means data portability is not a feature request, it is a promise. It means pricing has to be readable in one glance. It means support is answered by someone who can change the code.

For LatchDesk specifically, I worked with practicing IBCLCs in six US states through design and testing, sat in on recorded consults with family consent, and rebuilt more than sixty paper intake forms into templates. I do not present myself as a clinician and I never write clinical content. Every template phrase and every default in this product was reviewed by board certified consultants before it shipped.

How this product is built and maintained

LatchDesk ships small changes weekly rather than large releases twice a year, so a template fix a consultant asks for on Monday is usually live within days. Clinical wording never changes without review by a practicing IBCLC. Nothing on this marketing site is written by an outside agency: I write the copy, and every number quoted here comes from anonymized product usage across the practices on the platform or from surveys we ran with them, not from an industry report we did not read.

Editorially, the standard is simple. No claim without a source I can produce. No statistic rounded in our favor. No testimonial published without the consultant reading the final wording and approving it by email. When a number changes, the page changes. If I get something wrong here, I correct it and I say so rather than quietly editing.

On the product side, records are encrypted at rest, transfers run over TLS, and access is scoped to the practice that owns the record. We sign a business associate agreement on request. There are no advertising trackers on this site and no third party analytics cookies, because a page about clinical software has no business selling its visitors on.

What I am accountable for

Uptime, data safety, honest pricing and answering my own mail. If LatchDesk loses a chart, that is my failure and not a support ticket category. If a price changes for existing accounts, you hear it from me in advance, in writing. If you decide to leave, your export is complete and it is free.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and you reach me, not a queue. Demo requests, template questions, billing problems and blunt product criticism all land in the same inbox, and I answer within one business day. If you want to see the tool against your own visit flow, ask for a screen share and bring your real forms.

You can also start from the request form on the home page, or read the pricing before you write. The legal notice lists the publisher details in full.