One File on My Health, Finally

Before anything else, read this part.

Nothing below is medical advice. I'm an IT guy, not a doctor. Everything Claude handed me went to an actual medical provider for a human cross-check before I acted on a single thing. That's not a disclaimer I'm tacking on to cover myself, it's the actual instruction. Build the picture, then take the picture to your doctor. AI is the research assistant. Your provider is the one who signs off.

Okay. Now the fun part.

tl;dr - Big blood panel through Function Health. HealthEx pulled my three providers together. Both feed one Claude project. Take the results to your doctor.

Why I did this at all

I'm getting older. That's the whole reason.

I'm not great at tracking what I put in my body. I take vitamins, sort of. I might have sensitivities to things, probably. I've got decades of medical history sitting in portals I haven't logged into since whenever. If you asked me for a straight answer about my own baseline health, I couldn't give you one, and that bugged me. I've spent 25+ years telling people to document everything, and meanwhile the one system I can't replace was completely undocumented.

I wanted a baseline. Not a vibe, a baseline. Something with numbers in it, for me and for my family's sake.

That's around when I came across Function Health. Blood draw, big panel, they run it against a pile of biomarkers and tell you what you're short on, what you're sensitive to, what's drifting. That was close enough to what I was after, so I signed up.

Step one: the blood

Signed up, paid, booked the appointment, went in and got drawn. More than a dozen vials. I stopped counting somewhere around ten and just looked at the ceiling.

Then you wait. Results don't arrive all at once, they trickle in over days. A few markers show up, then a few more, then a panel fills in. It took about three or four weeks before I had the complete picture in the app.

When it finally landed, the headline was good. My overall biological age came back more than ten years under my actual age, based on the biomarkers. I'll take it. I felt great for roughly a day and a half.

Then the IT brain kicked in and I thought, okay, this is a hundred-something results sitting in one company's app. What do I actually do with it?

Step two: hooking it up to Claude

Function connects to Claude directly. That was the unlock.

I already had a Claude project called My Health, which up to that point was a graveyard of loose questions. Things I'd been meaning to look into, symptoms I'd noticed, half-remembered stuff from appointments. Individually, none of it meant much. All of it was related, and none of it was connected.

Once Function was wired in, that project stopped being a list of questions and became something I could actually interrogate. The biomarkers were the missing substrate. Now when I ask a question, the answer comes back grounded in my actual panel instead of general internet advice for a hypothetical 40-something man.

That alone would have been worth it. But it was still only half a picture, because a blood panel is a snapshot of one Tuesday.

Step three: the part I didn't know existed

I've used three different medical providers over the decades. Three separate portals, three separate logins, three separate piles of records that have never once been in the same room.

Turns out there's a connector for Claude called HealthEx that solves exactly this. It's a private company running on government-established rails, TEFCA and the CMS interoperability push, which is why it reaches as far as it does. It connects to tens of thousands of care sites, verifies who you are, and retrieves your actual clinical records without you doing the portal-login rain dance for each one.

It took everything off my plate. Diagnoses, lab results, medications, visit history, heart rate readings from things I went in for, all of it consolidated into one longitudinal record. Every connection is mine to grant and mine to revoke, which matters, and I'll come back to that.

So then I connected HealthEx into the same My Health project.

What that combination actually gets you

Now do the math on it.

Function gives me a snapshot: here's your chemistry, today. HealthEx gives me the timeline: here's everything that's happened to you and what your doctors wrote down about it. On their own, each one is a partial answer. Together, in one place, they're a complete file, and Claude can reason across both at once.

Say the panel flags fifteen things. Some of those are noise, the kind of number that drifts and means nothing. Knock those out, now you're down to a handful. Of that handful, some connect to something already sitting in my clinical history and some don't. That last cut is the one no dashboard on earth can make for me, because the dashboard has never seen my records.

You go from a wall of numbers to a short list. A short list is something you can walk into an appointment and actually discuss.

The concrete example: I was short on some vitamins and nutrients. Not shocking, but here's the part I liked. Instead of dumping a shopping list on me, Claude built a ramp. Week one, start this. Week two, bolt on that. Week three, add the next thing. Gradually work up to the full set, so you're introducing one variable at a time and you can tell what's doing what.

That's just good change management. You don't push twelve changes to production on a Friday and then try to figure out which one broke it.

The honest limits

I'm going to state these before I sell you on anything, because that's the only order that's fair.

Every connection is another copy of your health data. That's the real cost. Before I connected anything, I asked the same questions I'd ask a vendor at work. Who holds it. What's the retention, and can I truly delete it. What are they permitted to do with it in writing, not in marketing copy. And what happens to all of it if the company gets acquired or folds. That last one is the one people skip, and it's the one that matters most. Health data has a long shelf life.

Consent has to be revocable, and you have to actually check. The reason I was willing to do this is that both sides let me see and pull every connection I've granted. If a service can't show you a plain-language list of who has your records, that's your answer.

Convenience and exposure are the same lever. Pulling everything into one place is exactly what makes it useful and exactly what makes it worth stealing. I made that trade on purpose. Make yours on purpose too.

And Claude is not your doctor. It can spot a pattern across two data sources faster than any human. It cannot examine you. Every output is a question you bring to a professional, not an answer you act on.

How to do it like me

Order matters here. Records first, clever stuff second.

1. Get a paid Claude plan. Pro is enough, you don't need Max. Directory connectors like Function and HealthEx require a paid plan, and you have to add them from the web or desktop app, not from your phone. Once they're connected they work everywhere.
2. Round up your medical provider logins. All of them. Actually log in and confirm each one works before you go any further, because a portal you're locked out of is a portal you can't pull from.
3. Sign up for HealthEx and import your provider records. This becomes your source of truth. One consolidated history instead of three portals that have never met.
4. Sign up for Function, connect it to Claude, and go get your blood drawn. Then wait. Results trickle in over a few weeks, so don't expect a verdict on day one.
5. When the panel is complete, ask Claude for the 30,000 foot view. Both connectors are feeding it now, so you're getting your chemistry read against your actual history, not against a generic profile.
6. Take the recommendations to your doctor and let a human verify them. Non-negotiable. This is the step that makes the other five safe.

I did that last step myself, not just as advice I'm handing you. I took Claude's ramp to my doctor. She looked it over and gave it the green light. I'm a few weeks into it now, one addition at a time, same order Claude laid out. That's the whole point of this setup. It didn't play doctor. It got me a specific, sane starting point instead of a hundred flagged numbers and a shrug, and a professional still had to sign off before anything changed.

The clever part is the easy part. It always is. The valuable part is that I finally hold a complete file on myself, and I can walk into an appointment prepared instead of reconstructing twenty years of history out loud while the clock runs.

I've spent my whole career trying to empower somebody to answer their own question before they have to tap somebody on the shoulder for it. This is that same instinct, pointed at my own body. It doesn't replace the expert. It just means I stop wasting the expert's time on things I should have known about myself.

One housekeeping note. If you want to run the panel yourself, the link below is my referral link, and I get credit if you use it. I'd rather tell you that up front than bury it in small type. Use it or go straight to their site, the post reads the same either way.

Function Health