At ConnectED, we understand how overwhelming it is to live with complex, unexplained symptoms—especially when you don’t feel heard. Our founder, Tracy Finnegan, lived that journey for years. After countless appointments and uncertainty, she was finally diagnosed with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS). That experience opened her eyes to a deeper problem: the widespread lack of awareness and understanding of rare and underdiagnosed conditions like hEDS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS).
Tracy created ConnectED to change that. What began as a personal mission has evolved into a purpose-driven platform that empowers others to take control of their health journeys.
Bridging the Gap with Leading Technology and Compassion
ConnectED is a global first, innovative, user-friendly app designed to make sense of complex symptoms. Through a comprehensive questionnaire, our evidence weighted algorithm within the app compiles your symptom data into a structured, evidence- based report that highlights patterns and potential links to rare conditions.
While not a diagnostic tool, the app transforms vague, hard-to-explain symptoms into a clear, logical format—helping individuals advocate for themselves and enabling doctors to make more informed decisions.
This is how ConnectED bridges the communication gap between patients and providers. It simplifies symptom documentation and opens a clearer path to earlier recognition, accurate diagnosis, and more effective care. Most importantly, it reduces the bias which is a known problem for patients with complex illness, especially if you are female or gender diverse.
Innovation for Better Outcomes
By combining lived experience with cutting-edge technology, ConnectED is the first app of its kind focused on hEDS and its co-morbid conditions, POTS and MCAS. We believe in:
Professional patient-scientist. Pattern recognition across complex multi-system disease.
Tracy Finnegan is a professional patient-scientist working at the intersection of clinical medicine, systems biology, and health technology. Her research investigates the convergent biology of complex chronic conditions — currently focused on hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and post-viral neurodegenerative trajectories such as Long COVID — and proposes new mechanistic frameworks for how these conditions emerge, interact, and progress.
Her career has moved through five distinct chapters, each one informing the next. Intensive care nursing across three continents from 1991 to 2013 — Australia, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, where she gained her ICU certification, before returning to Perth and then Queensland — placed her inside two decades of acute physiological complexity. ICU work develops a particular kind of acute pattern recognition in complex multi-system disease: the trained capacity to read what is actually happening across many simultaneously failing systems, in real time, when the textbook does not yet apply. That capacity is the foundation of everything that follows. A Bachelor of Applied Science in Integrated Resource Management at the University of Queensland, completed in 2013 at age 40 — graduating with a GPA of 6.53 and a Dean’s Commendation in every semester completed — gave her the formal training in systems thinking and ecological pattern recognition.
Cattle farming at Jingeri Management Group from 2011 to 2023 — a regenerative grazing property in Kerry, South East Queensland, recognised by the Queensland Government for outstanding contribution to sustainable agriculture — taught her how complex living systems hold themselves together, and how they fall apart. Board governance with AgForce (2018–2020) and other agricultural and education boards developed strategic and institutional fluency. Together, these chapters gave her the methodology she now applies as a patient-scientist — turning ICU-trained pattern recognition, systems-science training, and her own multi-decade clinical dataset across the conditions she lives with into structured research.
She is the founder and Clinical Architect of ConnectED Health Australia, the platform built to give patients with complex multi-system conditions a structured way to bring their symptom pattern to clinicians who may have minutes to read it. ConnectED translates what patients know into what clinicians can act on.
Tracy’s current research case study, Multi-Hit Developmental Catastrophe and Post-Viral Neurodegeneration: A Case of Convergent Genetic, Environmental, and Infectious Triggers in Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, proposes new mechanistic frameworks — the Multi-Hit Developmental Catastrophe Model, the Spiral Coil Hypothesis, the SERPINA1/TPSAB1 functional axis, and the harmless variant problem — for the convergent biology of hEDS, MCAS, POTS and post-viral neurodegeneration. She writes regularly on these themes through her Substack publication, The Loose Thread, and her LinkedIn newsletter, The ConnectED Dots, where she explores the systems-level questions that sit beneath complex chronic disease.
She is a member of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience Director’s Circle at the University of Queensland and serves as a LEAN Patient Expert with the Australian POTS Foundation, where the committee advises on patient needs across policy and research frameworks, advocacy, and patient support tools. She will exhibit at the Converge Conference, Adelaide, in June 2026.
She lives with hEDS, MCAS and dysautonomia. These are the conditions her work investigates.
“When I started my degree at UQ, I said I’d bring it back into nursing somehow. I just had no idea how. Now here it is — all of it. Land. Systems. Care. Full circle.”
| Credentials | Current Roles | Writing | Upcoming |
|---|---|---|---|
Registered Nurse (Non-Practising, ICU) Intensive Care Certificate, South Africa Bachelor of Applied Science, Integrated Resource Management, University of Queensland (2013) Post-Graduate Certificate in AI in Healthcare, Harvard Medical School (2025) Certificate in Executive Presence and Influence: Persuasive Leadership Development, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (February 2026) MAICD, Australian Institute of Company Directors |
Founder & Clinical Architect, ConnectED Health Australia Member, Institute for Molecular Bioscience Director’s Circle, University of Queensland LEAN Patient Expert, Australian POTS Foundation Educator and advocate in the complex multi-system disease space |
The Loose Thread — Substack publication The ConnectED Dots — LinkedIn newsletter |
Exhibitor — Converge Conference, Adelaide, June 2026 |
Giving individuals the tools to advocate for their health.
The ConnectED Health Assessment App is a world-first innovation designed to help you understand your hEDS, MCAS, or POTS symptoms—so you feel seen, speak up and advocate for your care with your doctor.
ABN: 31 668 619 314
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