Most dogs' medical history lives in three places: a drawer, a camera roll, and their owner's increasingly unreliable memory. It works until it doesn't, and the moments it doesn't (emergency vet, border crossing, boarding check-in) are exactly the moments you can't reconstruct it. Here's what a complete record contains, and the low-effort way to keep one.
The seven things worth tracking
1. Vaccinations, with due dates
Not just what was given, but when the next one is due. Kennels and groomers verify currency, not history. Photograph every certificate the day it's issued and note the booster date, the full schedule is in our vaccination guide.
2. Weight, over time
A single weight is trivia; a curve is diagnostic. Gradual gain hides inside a fluffy coat for months, and unexplained loss is one of the earliest signals of real illness in dogs. Weigh monthly (vet scale, or you-holding-dog minus you on the bathroom scale) and write it down. Ten seconds a month buys you the trend line your vet actually wants to see.
3. Medications and preventives
Flea/tick and heartworm preventives are monthly, which means they're forgettable. Record the product, dose and date, "did I give the chew this month or last month?" should never be a genuine mystery.
4. Vet visits, in one line each
Date, reason, outcome. "March, ear infection, drops for 10 days, cleared." When a symptom recurs a year later, that one line converts a vague "I think this happened before?" into a pattern the vet can use.
5. Microchip number and registration
The chip only works if the registry has your current phone number. Store the chip number where you can find it, and check the registration whenever you move. A chip pointing at your old number is jewellery.
6. Insurance policy details
Insurer, policy number, what's excluded. Emergency clinics ask; 2am is a bad time to search your email for a PDF from two years ago.
7. Documents themselves
Rabies certificates, health certificates from travel, adoption or breeder paperwork, prescriptions. Photos of paper are fine, the point is that they're together, dated and findable.
Paper card vs. camera roll vs. an actual system
The paper card fails because it lives in one drawer in one country. The camera roll fails because a vaccine certificate from last March is 4,000 photos deep. What works is anything that keeps health entries structured (typed, dated, with due dates) and exportable (one file you can hand to a boarder, sitter or new vet).
Test your system with one question: "Could the dog-sitter produce proof of rabies while you're on a plane?" If the answer involves calling you, it's not a system yet.
How Pawport does it
Pawport keeps a health drawer inside your dog's passport: vaccines with due-date reminders, a weight graph, meds, vet visits and identifiers, all on your own iCloud. The whole record exports as a single clean PDF, the exact thing kennels, airlines and new vets ask for. And because it lives next to the fun stuff (walks, milestones, questionable haircuts), you actually open the app often enough to keep it current, which is the entire battle.
