The operating system for medical & academic research
Dr Costa is an operating system for medical and academic research: one governed path from a plain-language idea to a drafted protocol, an ethics pack, participant consent and data collection, and a locked, exportable dataset.
Every decision here has a name on it. AI drafts; a named, qualified person signs; an append-only ledger keeps the record. And because no one can quietly rewrite it, the name is protection — the record of what you decided, and what you didn’t.
Free for students · Researcher Pro £39 a month · every price published.
Starting a study starts the paperwork, not the research: recruitment stays closed until the study’s approvals and its named safety contact are signed into the record.
Who this is for
Different desks, same problem: research scattered across tools nobody chose is hard to oversee and expensive to defend. Dr Costa gives every study the same signed path, and the people responsible clear sight of it.
A department’s research lives in fifty spreadsheets and six survey tools. The audit trail lives nowhere. The research office answers for all of it.
The audit trail writes itself as the study runs — so when the question comes, the version, the signature and the history are already there.
Clinician research runs on the edges of clinic time. Every workaround an investigator invents becomes your data-protection problem.
A governed route built to fit inside clinic time. Your office gets what it is asked for: versions, signatures, history.
Across a programme, instruments fork and consent versions blur. You find out at pooling time — when it is too late to fix.
Locked protocols and versioned instruments keep sites comparable. Every dataset leaves with its data dictionary and audit history. The version is the version.
Funding investigator-led research means carrying its risk without holding its systems, and hearing about drift when the report is late.
Clear sight of how each study is actually run, while the study team keeps ownership of the work. Sight, not control.
The shape of a study
Dr Costa is a single chain. The protocol your ethics pack cites, the consent your participants sign and your team countersigns, and the dataset you lock are always the same study. Between systems is where versions slip; here there is no between.
Describe
Say what you want to learn, from whom, and what you will measure, in plain language. That is enough to open a study.
Draft
An AI assistant drafts protocol sections; you review, edit and sign each one in. A draft stays labelled a draft until a person accepts it.
Prepare
Participant information, consent documents and supporting papers are drafted from the locked protocol — the pack and the protocol cannot quietly disagree. Committees rarely refuse ideas; they query inconsistencies.
Consent & collect
Consent is a signing ceremony, not a checkbox: the participant signs, the study team countersigns, and every version is kept. Participants record what the protocol asks, in an app designed around the person holding the phone.
Lock & export
When collection ends, you lock the dataset. It leaves with its data dictionary and audit history; the analysis happens in the tools you already trust.
Architecture, not badges
Dr Costa is built on one rule: the easy path is the compliant path. What follows are the mechanisms you can inspect, and the refusals that hold.
AI drafts. A named, qualified person reviews, edits and signs — nothing written by AI becomes part of a study without a named human signature.
Every AI draft is stored with the model that produced it, and stays labelled as AI-suggested until a person accepts it.
Every state change writes an audit event to an append-only, hash-chained ledger, in the same transaction as the change itself.
Append-only by construction: the database role that writes the ledger cannot update or delete.
Names and contact details belong in a separate identity vault with its own keys. Participants appear in the research store only under a code — it has no participant name, email or date-of-birth column.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with identifying data under its own keys.
Runs on UK-based infrastructure: the deployment region is AWS London.
AI inference runs through EU-resident endpoints — never a global route.
Approval is a click. A signature is a person.
Design decisions — and they hold even where the feature would be easy to build.
Why this exists
Dr José Maia e Costa
Founder · Consultant Paediatrician in Allergy
The other half of every study
The design floor is a cautious 67-year-old at her kitchen table: WCAG 2.2 AA minimum, legible at 200% text on a small screen, keyboard-operable throughout — no dark patterns, no streaks, no gamification.
Complete, truthful datasets begin with participants who are treated well. No streaks, no badges, no countdown timers — people stay because the study deserves it.
Pricing
Free for students. £39 a month for an investigator. £29 a seat for teams of five or more. Institutional licences priced with you — and every number is public.
Next step
Sign up, describe the question, and the signed path is yours — protocol to locked dataset, with your name where it matters. If you would rather see it first, bring your hardest reviewer to a demonstration.
Free tier for students — academic email required. No card needed to begin.