Latest / Healthier: Building Health & Fitness Businesses / How to analyse your blood test results | Hamish Grierson, Thriva | Healthier Ep 6
Transcript
- Patrick Sammuel Llaguno: If on the one hand you've got generic chatbot or you know a search engine for health articles, it's very much not that. It's an advisor, it has all the health context. As a consequence of that, it has a very, very high level of clinical rigor and safety. How is my cholesterol doing versus men of my age? There are lots of chatbots in apps, right? The vast majority of which are not. Very good in my experience. The health assistant is the easiest way to probably think about it, is it's health advice that knows you and actually knows you. Welcome back to Health Stacks, a very exciting episode today. ⁓ special guest, introduce yourself. Thanks, Will. Yeah, great to be with you. ⁓ I'm Hamish. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO here at Thriver and ⁓ Thriver for Partners, which is our ⁓ B2B division. Amazing. And what does Thriver do? Thriver is a UK-based health tech company, but actually we get out of bed every single day because we care very deeply about helping people to live better for longer. And with all the incredible amount of noise going on in the health space, ⁓ we want to help people to push what matters. And actually practically we do that by helping people to keep track of what's going on inside their body, specifically ⁓ their blood, understand what it means, and really importantly, to take action. And so we have this curious reality, which is lots of the magic of the thing that we've created happens when we're not there, you know, as people make ⁓ sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. Choices in lifestyle, ⁓ that all ultimately are geared around helping them live better for longer. Amazing. If you are around about my age in the UK, then you've probably either had ⁓ Thriver come through the door or you've had s a colleague at work turn up with a little colourful sticker, the the little colourful plaster that's kind of covering yeah the t the test that they've done. ⁓ it's like you guys ⁓ have been everywhere for for a long time and have been part of that revolution to get people's data in their own hands to be able to ⁓ empower some more healthy decisions. So it's very, very exciting for you to be here. And what can people expect to learn today if they stick around for the next 15, 20 minutes or so? Yeah, so look, I want to try to help people to understand how the stuff that we have built and are ⁓ shipping now, if you're not an expert and you don't want to build this stuff yourself, we recognize that there's a a huge category of people. ⁓ who need help and we wanted to build solutions to do all of the things that I talked about at the start of the podcast. Some of this is literally hot off the press. It's going live today or tomorrow. Some of it's been live for a handful of months. And I think we probably won't talk a huge amount about the overarching experience outside of some of the the cool technology that we've built, but that little plaster you talked about, for example, on the end of people's fingers, you know, we now have people using upper arm collection devices. So we'll change. It's gone easier. And so, you know, whilst getting blood out of people is never a totally straightforward thing, the total ambition here for us talking about this stuff on the podcast is to help you understand how we can make it incredibly straightforward and ultimately useful. Amazing. So we're gonna get to see some of your latest tech that helps people, no matter what their level of experience and no matter what their level of knowledge, get more of an idea of what's happening inside their body. And ultimately be able to use that information for their own good. That's what it's all about. Absolutely. Amazing. We love a screen share. Should we get going? I will share my screen. Take us away. And just while we get started, a little a little aside is that I used to have to get your co founder to come over because I'm so squeamish. That I used to have Elliot come over to my house and be my personal concierge when taking my my Thriver tests. Very funny. Well, I'm glad to ⁓ I'm glad to hear that, Will. I ⁓ if you need me to take over now Elliot's no longer with this. No, it's all easy now. I've seen the ARM device. Yeah. Well, ⁓ the concierge service remains extended too if ⁓ if if ⁓ if you need it. So yeah, the the first thing just to ⁓ flag is Compass is a ⁓ a product we put out ⁓ very recently. The reality is lots of people just don't want to think about this stuff. They need someone to tell them what they ought to be testing and to have that testing be the right testing for them over time. So just to set the sort of stall out at the outset, we created Compass to be able to be that. You don't have to think about it. You have it for a year, it does three tests over the year. It starts with a big panel, and you get a whole bunch of stuff between tests that I'm going to spend more of the time talking about today. so just to I guess cite some of the products and features that we're gonna go through, Compass is the most recent. incarnation of something that's designed to be simple for people who just want to know that they're covered. That makes sense? Yep. Very And one of my questions is gonna is going to be not yet, but like what are the what are the things that people tend or what are the areas that people tend to learn about themselves in from from engaging with compass. But we'll get there when we get there. We're gonna get there quite fast. ⁓ paint a picture here which is that people have just done their first test and I'm gonna take you over to the mobile app to ⁓ show you what that experience is like and actually to jump into a couple of the features that ⁓ we alluded to earlier. So here is the Thriver app. A bit of a early advertisement for the fact that this is getting completely rebuilt, but ⁓ always good to show it as it stands right now. So the first thing ⁓ to point out is that historically Thriver data was your blood test data and your health profile information. So you would tell us all of the relevant things. That we needed to know about you to have the context to provide some ⁓ utility to you when the results came back. And so to show you the results tab, this is just a very high-level view inside the results tab. Everything is both color-coded, written in plain English. You can dive into the individual reports, or you can look at ⁓ individual assays ⁓ or test types. ⁓ you can look at some more detail, you know, there's some of these ⁓ That would have trended over time. Maybe I can go down to ⁓ active B12 to show you this here. And so at a very, very ⁓ simplistic level, simply knowing what active B12 is, what's my number, can I see how that number has changed over time? And you can see ⁓ down at the bottom there's a graph. It's obviously showing you whether or not you're in the appropriate range. ⁓ I can look at different time horizons, and really importantly. There's another toggle up here which allows you to compare. And this comparison is because we've got 10 years worth of ⁓ data, all obviously anonymized, we have the capacity to say, look, for men like me, aged forty to forty-nine, believe it or not, I now fall into that age bracket. I'm firmly in denial, but I do. ⁓ how am I looking relative to that pack? ⁓ so not only are you Explaining what stuff means, you're giving people that context as well. I think this is a big part where like on this channel channel, we love vibe coding, we like making our own stuff, but there are limitations. And I think this is somewhere where using a kind of best in class solution starts to shine, which is not just to say like what is what is my result, and not just to say what is my result versus average, but actually you have proprietary data which we exactly coders can't get hold of. There's it's really interesting to be able to say what a what what is this result look like against people of my gender, of my age range. And I assume at least maybe some point in the future, like the the the like the I don't know, if I aspire to be an everyday athlete, what does that compare against it? ⁓ yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No, exactly. So ⁓ ultimately the more ⁓ context we have about you, the more utility we can provide back. So we if we know that you've got a a very, very ⁓ high level of cardiovascular exercise as a core part of your ⁓ your routine. Clearly we can start pattern matching that against people who you would consider a more relevant peer group than than the norm. Okay, so we're talking about what I would consider to be the basics here. ⁓ there's something else which ⁓ is interesting I think potentially for your ⁓ audience, which is ⁓ I've only actually done one home assisting test, so this is more just to showcase ⁓ something ⁓ That is a little unusual. So in addition to ⁓ what are referred to as ⁓ traditional reference ranges, you can see on the left hand side here, there's both a light green and a dark green bar. The rationale for that is being inside the reference range. We can get into what reference ranges are if it'll be useful for your audience, but inside the reference range is good. But there is oftentimes literature and robust literature that says, Well, actually you may want to be in an optimal level. at an optimal level. And here is what that level ⁓ is for someone ⁓ like you. So in addition to the traditional ranges, we also have optimal ranges so that people can That's really cool for for kind of people who are really into this stuff and want to optimize. Who who in your team is making those decisions and and how are you making those decisions? Like what and and I don't know if this is a if this is a good question, but w is there a viewpoint on what optimal like ⁓ might look like and and how out there the like the sci how new the science might be in order to feed into that? Are you are you conservative? Are you are you on the cus cusp cusp of things? Yeah, talking through that. So so I would say we're somewhere in middle. Where there is really robust peer reviewed literature, ⁓ we will include those ranges because we to answer the question directly, it's our clinical team who will ⁓ come to a ⁓ decision as to whether or not to include a range ⁓ on the optimal as opposed to traditional side. But I would say that we are increasingly pushing the envelope in terms of what what is possible. When you actually think about reference ranges, really you're taking two standard deviations from ⁓ the mean and you're looking at a particular ⁓ population. Well, what's the population? You know, oftentimes those were ranges developed in a perhaps less relevant population. And so I think over time you might well see us start to push the envelope in terms of how. we express ranges and to whom and ⁓ make that frankly a just more useful exercise for people. So I would say, you know, if on the one hand a written number on a PDF that means absolutely nothing to most people, we've gone ninety percent in the other direction to make it intuitive and understandable and have optimal ranges so you've got something to really aim at. but that last five percent I think is still worth going at over the course of the next couple of years. That's awesome. Just something else very quickly that I noticed there was that you can it said Thrive a result and then uploaded result or imported result. So does that mean that we could coin things from other places? Yeah, exactly. So you know the ⁓ the goal really is to provide as much utility to customers as humanly possible. So if you have results from other places, absolutely you can upload them. ⁓ we want to make Thrive the place ⁓ that, as I say, you're gonna extract maximum ⁓ utility from by having more information in. On the topic of which, so ⁓ we talked about ⁓ results and the overviews, and there's also reports. ⁓ maybe I can just show you a a quick report. ⁓ I don't know, I'm gonna randomly pick a different one ⁓ that has a few more markers in, so I can ooh, sorry, my scroll ⁓ on the computer's not so good. So you also have comments by ⁓ a doctor. The reason that I'm ⁓ flashing this up is in addition to the actual ⁓ diagnostic data that's coming out of ⁓ the lab. looking at the blood itself. Of course, you also have a doctor's context, i.e., how do they think about ⁓ the lab data, and there's a written report ⁓ that everyone gets when they ⁓ do a test. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time on the report itself. I'm just ⁓ marking the fact that that's actually really important because it's another ⁓ data feed in to the aggregate amount of information that Thriver has ⁓ to help you Get some utility out of us as a provider. So far, we've got your health profile, you know, your what medication you might or might not be on, your health history, ⁓ we know all of your ⁓ phenotype data. We now have your ⁓ blood test data from ⁓ you doing the test. So what comes next? Well, in thinking about health span, you can see a little button coming down here. We recognized very early on that There is a package of information that we're otherwise blind to that's incredibly relevant for us to understand because it will help us or rather help our customers to make progress. And so ⁓ we created ⁓ wearable integration ⁓ and shipped that at the back end of last year. And you can pull in basically any of the popular wearable data from Aura and Whoop Garmin and you know, keep going. So What that means in practice is when you're looking at your health span dashboard as it sort of stands today, what you're seeing in a single place is not just, and I'll just take the top example here, it's not just your ⁓ lipoprotein or lipoprotein A, or your triglycerides, which are the markers that you can see here in this top row under heart. You can also see, and maybe I'll ⁓ a panic. Across ⁓ so you can see it, you can see your resting heart rate and you can see your VO2 max. Now, those are really, really important pieces of information when you're trying to understand someone's heart health picture. Some of it comes out of the blood, some of it comes out of your wearable. We wanted to make sure there was a singular home so that we had the expression of all of that data kind of under one roof. And we're gonna get to the punchline, which is this little button floating down here in a second. ⁓ which is the health assistant. So the more information you are easily able to provide, the better the context is that we have on you. And now you have ⁓ the coming together, I think, of two otherwise totally disparate ⁓ data sources. The relatively periodic view of what's going on inside your blood. Maybe you do that once every three months, four months, ⁓ four months, five months, and your wearable data, which may be pinging every half a second. And clearly. the bringing together of well your wearable is revealing something about your lifestyle decisions day to day, from a sleep quality to steps to cardiovascular, et cetera. With your blood test data, there's something much more powerful about those two things ⁓ in concert. Does that make sense? Makes a load of sense. So if I was thinking about getting making the absolute most of this, what would be the couple of things that you would that you would encourage me to to surface to it? So wearable data. And and I'm guessing like some of the most important stuff there is things like your heart rate and how that changes over time, your HRV, ⁓ what else what else you're like your activity levels maybe? Yeah, exactly. And most of the time you don't even need to think about it. You just connect it up and we'll pull it through. And I can see VO two Max in there. That's obviously a standalone test that you're you're probably putting on a Bane mask and jumping on a treadmill. Is there anything else that you'd wanna like if if someone was gonna go all all in on this and make sure that you get all of the the data in there. What else might you in ask for the I really like a couple of the ones in here. So grip strength, ⁓ Tommy Wood talks about this very eloquently. There's a lot of people who've ⁓ gone out and bought ⁓ grip strength trainers because it became clear that ⁓ grip strength is an indicator of ⁓ health span longevity. Just to be clear, it's a corollary ⁓ you know, you can get very strong hands and fall over dead of a heart attack. ⁓ what you know we've got to think about those two things in in concert. So grip strength, this is something you can add your own grip strength. It's a really straightforward test. You know, it's not something that you're going to be doing through the Thriver application at the moment, but you can buy a grip strength meter on Amazon very inexpensively. You saw their single leg stand time as well. Again, that's a we have a little video, it'll guide you ⁓ on how to do it. What are some of the other ones that I would probably ⁓ have people think about HRV, step count, sleep quality, ⁓ you know, all of those I think are really, really interesting. Do you see Thriver's role here as surfacing it, ⁓ surfacing this information, giving you a place to put it all in one place, and then giving you a place to ask questions using the little button in the corner? Or do you f see yourselves going one step further to say, right, here's how we help you improve this stuff? So it's very much a journey from the former to the latter. Task one was to create the housing and give people early utility by having it all live in one place and being able to very easily compare rather than the stuff living in spreadsheet tabs and you know being very ⁓ you know very difficult to spot ⁓ patterns and trends. Make no mistake though, the goal is for us to have maximum impact. And one of the internal measures ⁓ is have people. you can we can we quantify this? Made a positive change and that could be almost anything as a consequence of something that they learned or did as a ⁓ reality of being a Thriver customer. So let me just answer that question in ⁓ doing a bit of show rather than tell. So yeah, to your point, got the housing, that's great. By having a really rich context heavy amount of data about you, that is credible. And that point probably oughtn't to be ⁓ missed. We have now got, thanks to ⁓ the advent of the LLM ⁓ technologies, the ability to make sense of what is otherwise an incredibly disparate and fragmented data set. So the next bit to move on to is health systems. So this is not yet out. There's a little bit of a a peek under the hood. There are lots of chatbots in apps, right? The vast majority of which are not very good in my experience. And if you look at the sort of MPS and ⁓ general sort of positivity and sentiment around them, they're pretty poor. We took the hard path on this one, and huge props to ⁓ Tom and the team who built it. The health assistant is the easiest way probably to think about it, is it's health advice that knows you and actually knows you. So it's Always on, it's obviously inside the Thriver app. And it's probably best to think about it as you've got the intelligence of Claude or Chat GPT, except this has your blood test data, your sleep data, your movement data, your body composition, your grip strength, your health profile, it's got your goals. You know, what is it that you're working on, right? So if on the one hand you've got generic chatbot or you know a search engine for health articles. It's very much not that. It's an advisor. It has all the health context. As a consequence of that, it has a a very, very high level of clinical rigor and safety and responsibility baked into it as well. So appreciate ⁓ I appreciate that outside in these things can all look pretty similar. So why don't I get into it? So there's a couple of ways that you can navigate it. There are some prompts that And by the way, the first time you use it, there's a little bit of onboarding that ⁓ I've skipped over here. So either you can just click one of these prompts and ask how my ⁓ energy scores changed over time or what morning routine ⁓ routines ⁓ could support my results. So I'm going to ask it a question. ⁓ maybe I'll ask how is my cholesterol doing versus men of my age? And the other thing about this is it's got Obviously, all of the anonymous data that we talked about before that powers some of those comparative views, like how do I look relative to the ⁓ the peer set, that's also available here. So the most ⁓ recent test results, cholesterol tests from Feb 2026. ⁓ it's going away and actually having a look at those trends. Here's a thorough picture, tabularized. So this is looking at the markers, telling you what they mean. ⁓ how does it compare to other men in my in my bracket? ⁓ what the doctor report actually said. So it's a bit of a reminder and a ⁓ a recap on some of those things, the trends over time. And then here's the lifestyle angle. So I mentioned that I drink 10 units of alcohol per week. ⁓ to be fair, I think I've started drinking a bit less, thankfully, but that was the last time I input the data. and it also talked a bit about you know the Actual decisions I'm making around whether it's cycling or weightlifting or what have you. And a recap on the fact that it said omega ⁓ three and six ratio is something to be work. Very, very cool. What was the most difficult thing about making this work? ⁓ waiting for the LLM technology. The most difficult thing about making it work balancing the huge amount of potential information that you could share with the relevant amount of information that's going to be useful. And so you can probably see very quickly that day one, this is about being able to interrogate and get great insights and recommendations. Maybe I'll I'll do you one more prompt. ⁓ can you give me a recipe recommendation? I love walnuts. for tonight's dinner with a focus on the omega. Well ⁓ three boost you mentioned. So yeah, this is a good example, right? Where we could pull in all of the underlying clinical evidence associated with Omega three and six at this point to sort of remind you that that's something that matters, but we're obviously obscuring all of that and just focusing on the thing that's most relevant to the question here. So on the one hand, it's just making a product like this be actually useful and how do you sort of navigate the challenges of that? There's a huge amount of safety and regulation that we've navigated very carefully. It's unfortunate that in an industry like this one, bad actors probably will either come or are already here, who will take a faster to market, less risk balanced approach to some of this stuff. And they may end up, you know, causing some problems for the folks who are doing it more thoroughly like we have. ⁓ but we also see it as our obligation to do it right and to make sure that this stuff is balanced just the right. just the right way. So here you go. Here's your recipe for tonight's dinner will. If you ⁓ like walnuts and ⁓ you like the sound of seared salmon with a walnut and herb crust. On it. Send it over. this this is awesome. It's it's it's super exciting. I think there's so many ⁓ there's so much opportunity in this one place for my health data. Let me make it beneficial to me. And it seems like the approach you're taking is is a really, really useful one. Thank you very much. Yeah. I mean it is ⁓ I think probably the first innings. ⁓ That much is clear. I think for those customers who come aboard and ⁓ want to use it in the way that it's, you know, designed ⁓ today, they will also be here for the next evolution as we start to make it dynamic and being able to push information to you and surface proactive recommendations that don't fall foul of that trust ⁓ barrier, but are very much about helping you focus on the small number of things that are going to really move the needle. And it's funny, well, you know, people talk a lot about Health is a is a lot. Just i in general, health is a lot. There's a lot to think about. There's competing views on fat or carbs on one you know, it's just it's a lot to contend with. And we very much see our role as helping you to do less. Actually do less. Take things out of your supplement stack that you don't need. Stop focusing on this thing because actually really you just need to keep your hammer down on this particular access. Got so many, so many friends whom whom who message talking about supplements and what should I be taking and things like that. And my answer's always go and get a blood test. ⁓ find out. Work out whether you actually need anything. Yeah. And please do tell us how we got on with a health assistant so that we can keep making it better. There you go. That's Compass. Amazing. Health band dashboard reports, optimal ranges and the health assistant to round us out. And people just head off to your website ⁓ to get started. That's right. Thriver.co, T H R I V A.co. Thank you so much. That's been an awesome tour. Excited for people to go away, get started, get some benefit from it. And also see because I'm assuming everyone owns their data, can take their data out if they want to. So that they could be getting their their three tests a year, doing all the cool stuff in compass and then building on top if if they'd like to. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean we firmly advocate for the fact that ⁓ whilst we're gonna make being inside the Thriver ecosystem as useful as possible and as ⁓ as meaningful a place to spend time as we can, we don't want to lock you here. We want to enable that to to be something that ⁓ were you to want to, you can use elsewhere too. Amazing. Thank you so much, Hamish. I'm excited to see what you keep on. Lovely to talk about it. Really ⁓ enjoyed it. Well thanks, mate.