Phial is in active development. The governance foundation — human gates, append-only records, independently tested transaction guarantees — is complete. The application is now being built on top of it, in public. The running record lives in The Record.
The problem
Health-economic research is fragmented across literature tools, spreadsheets, statistical software, modeling engines, repositories, and manual review. The most consequential decisions often disappear between them: why one source was chosen, whether a comparator is current, where a parameter came from, or whether a conclusion still matches the latest run.
Reproducibility is necessary. It is not sufficient. A model can perform the same operation perfectly every time and still be built on the wrong specification.
Reproducibility tells you the machine did the same thing twice. Validation asks whether it should have done that thing at all.
The vision
Phial is the operating system a health economist opens on the first day of a question and closes when the work can defend itself.
Evidence goes in. An audit-ready model comes out. Between them sits a governed path — specification, execution, validation, review — where every assumption is visible, every transformation is traceable, and every consequential decision belongs to a human willing to put their name beside it.
Agents assist. Deterministic tools calculate. Humans decide.
The first mission
The first mission is independent validation. Economic models steer decisions worth billions in care — and many were built for a pricing world that no longer exists. Phial exists to test them, refresh them against current evidence, and publish work that survives the asking.
Open source. Model-optional. No single provider becomes the architecture. No agent becomes the authority.
Why the name
A phial is a vessel. Evidence enters fragmented; governed structure makes it legible. The boundary is human control. The lattice within it is the interdependent record of sources, parameters, assumptions, calculations, approvals, and claims.
The deeper reference is the Phial of Galadriel: light carried into darkness when the road can no longer be seen. It does not carry the burden for the person holding it. It gives them enough light to continue.
The tool is not the hero. The person carrying it is.
The founder mandate
- Agents assist.
- Deterministic tools calculate.
- Humans approve every consequential scientific decision.
- Independent validation challenges implementation and specification.
- Artifacts—not conversations—are the source of truth.
- No result outranks the integrity of the process that produced it.
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