First things first - quick reminder, we have a livestream scheduled today (January 14th @11am ET to dive into the flipped food pyramid) - here is link.
Last week ChatGPT stole the show announcing ChatGPT Health - only to take the wind out of everyone’s sails by simply offering a wait list.
But alas, it’s JPM Healthcare week in San Francisco, and as is typically the case, a big announcement was timed with the event. Anthropic sent a counterstrike. The headline read "Anthropic joins OpenAI's push into health care with new Claude tools." The kicker? Claude’s healthcare features are live NOW.
Let me just say my mind is officially blown. So much so that Carter Williams and I went live last night to debrief more about what I learned when I used myself as the guinea pig and went down the rabbit hole.If it weren't for being Carter Williams' sidekick I would be blissfully ignoring all things AI and still convincing myself we could “fix healthcare” out flitting around San Francisco talking about how we could fix it. That was then, this is now and since we want to unlock the market that ends the chronic disease epidemic, I have no choice but to embrace AI and learn to code in it.
For those that don’t have time to listen to the recording or watch the video, below is a quick synopsis. We will save you from the full transcript.
Preamble & Context
-Per announcement "you can integrate all of your personal information together with your medical records and your insurance records, and have Claude as the orchestrator and be able to navigate the whole thing and simplify it for you" -You have to be a Pro or Max subscriber, thanks to Carter's recent Claude coding bonanza, I upgraded to Max last week -Once connected, Claude will "summarize your medical history across providers, explain lab results and test findings in plain language, detect patterns across fitness metrics and health data over time, help you prepare questions for doctor appointments and identify trends you might want to discuss with your provider"-The Consumer health integrations are all beta and are done through the Connector setting (you have to browse connectors to find them) some are rolling out this week - HealthEx, Function Health and Apple Health / Android Health - you have to add the connectors but it's easy. Supposedly Apple Health will be via app and as of this post it's now showing for me-I went into HealthEx separately and set things up - if I wasn't hellbent on getting through it, I probably would have stopped the setup as it was annoying to me to have to find providers in HealthEx and then provide separate login details for each portal, many of which I haven't accessed in over 5 years. Unfortunately the beta version of the connector failed to work and I’m actively troubleshooting with HealthEx to resolve.-I've tried multiple similar platforms that seek to integrate and automatically find my EHR data but it's a nightmare because my providers aren't part of big health systems so they are part of the smaller ambulatory EMRs that aren't integrated into platforms like HealthEx. But I decided Claude is here to stay so I might as well invest the time.-As for aggregating everything into HealthEx - my biggest frustration is that the majority of my recent health data isn't available, especially labs - WHY IS Labcorp STILL NOT PLAYING?! THANK GOODNESS QUEST IS!!! Talk about differentiation, Quest Diagnostics now has a loyal customer. I'm so annoyed that my recent Prenuvo enhanced scan labs and my Superpower labs aren't integrated through connectors. It's a true differentiator for Function Health. Thankfully ŌURA is partners with Quest, so the labs I'm having drawn Wednesday via my OURA app theoretically should sync with Claude.
-I ended up doing it all the old fashioned way and spent about 3-4 hours broken up over the last two days to integrate of my health data, which is my case is A TON. Hundreds of tests, etc.
We Skipped JPM
While the healthcare industry gathered at JP Morgan this week, Ellen and Carter stayed home. Not because they couldn’t go—Ellen has attended the last two years—but because they’re building System C, and JPM is quintessentially System B. As Carter put it: “You can’t simply re-engineer System B to be better at this point. You have to engineer the right answer from first principles.”
They have “spies” at JPM feeding them intelligence. But the real action this week? Ellen went down a rabbit hole with Claude for Healthcare that left her calling Carter twice in one afternoon.
To all of our friends out there - our hearts go out to you. TRY TO STAY WELL!
The Experiment: 60 Files, One Simple Prompt
I created project in Claude named Health Optimization. I load about 60 files from the last 10 years that included:
* LabCorp results dating back to 2016 (277 biomarker elements)
* Quest diagnostics
* Various physician portal records
* HealthEx aggregated data
* DEXAfit scan from San Francisco
* Pranuvo full-body MRI and enhanced EEG
* Beam brain EEG report
* Functional medicine records from her 2018 mold exposure crisis
* And a more and yes it was a royal pain in the you know what, if it weren’t for the substack I likely would have bailed
I created bare bones project instructions were bare bones focused on healthspan optimization using Peter Attia’s framework.
Then I used a super simple prompt for the first output”
“Using what you know about my health data from the project files, can you give me an overview of what I should do to be the healthiest version of myself?”
After reading what it produced I asked it to create a formal report.
Mind blown: A 12-Page Personalized Health Report
What Claude generated stunned me.
It produced a comprehensive report that followed Peter Attia’s Four Horsemen of Health using my 10 years of history distilling it down to the type of comprehensive report I have yet to receive after tens of thousands of dollars spent on clinicians ranging from basic primary care to world-renowned specialists to concierge docs to TCM clinicians to functional health docs to natruopaths with some chiropractors and energy workers in between. I shared the report on the video.
Executive Summary - Four Horsemen Assessment:
* Cardiovascular: Low risk
* Metabolic: Exceptional
* Neurodegenerative: Monitor
* Cancer: Low risk
It even created a “Good News” highlights:
* ApoB improved 21% (94→74), moving from borderline to optimal
* Visceral fat in the 5th percentile (near zero)
* Fasting insulin of 3.7 indicating excellent insulin sensitivity
* A1C of 5.0%—”essentially zero risk of type 2 diabetes”
* VO2 max of 45.8—highest category for a 53-year-old woman
Then it took my history and lab results and created a critical finding…
“Your severely undertreated thyroid is the single most important modifiable factor affecting your health span. This requires urgent attention and is likely contributing to your cognitive symptoms, slow reaction time, verbal memory deficit, and may be accelerating brain aging despite your otherwise exceptional protective factors.”
Claude didn’t just flag isolated issues. It connected the dots between my thyroid dysfunction and the brain findings.
My immediate response to the thyroid finding? Since I’ve known I have an issue for over 20 years and know the drill, I went online and discovered I could get Armour thyroid (which for me works better than synthroid) prescribed for $22 (prescriber approval) plus $60 for the medication - no doctor visit required.
Carter even questioned my own healthcare consumption and I admitted - “I am completely outside the incumbent System B healthcare revenue system now.”
* Time invested: ~5 hours
* Compute cost: Approximately $0.20-$0.50
* Result: The most robust, personalized health plan I’ve ever received
The Disruption Framework
Carter drew the Uber parallel: When Uber launched, people assumed the San Francisco taxi market was $400M. Turns out it was $700M—$300M of demand wasn’t being captured because of friction (convenience, timing, price, availability).
Ellen represents the healthcare equivalent: consumers who want to stay pre-chronic, who want to stay out of the system, who are willing to invest in prevention but have been priced out or friction-ed out of traditional healthcare.
The tools doctors use are becoming readily available. The friction is disappearing. And as Carter noted: “We need a lot less doctors.”
What’s Next
Part II will cover:
* My deep dive into my brain findings (the scary part that had me considering a hyperbaric chamber)
* The protocol Claude generated based on the Sherzai’s research, Dr. Bredesen’s work, and Walter Longo’s longevity framework
* How Claude synthesized multiple expert frameworks into personalized recommendations
The Invitation
Carter offered to help any of our tribe do the same thing by scheduling time with us. We are putting together a link for that but in the meantime, feel free to reach out to schedule. Your assignment in the meantime is to collect all of your health data from the various EMRs on which they reside.
Bottom Line: While System B gathered at JPM to discuss incremental improvements to a broken system, I stayed home and built a personalized health optimization plan using AI that outperformed anything I’ve ever received, for less than the cost of a latte.
It’s not perfect, full of terrifying flaws and lacks tons of what I want from clinicians but it’s important we all understand what consumers have at their fingertips!
This is System C. And it’s live now.
