The baseline you already paid for

An entire industry has grown up around selling people new information about their own bodies. Almost nobody has a copy of the information already collected about them.

Two numbers, and I'd like you to hold them next to each other for a moment.

So: a quarter of a million people are buying brand-new data about their bodies, at meaningful expense, while most people cannot assemble the data that has already been collected about them — and almost nobody has tried.

I don't think that's irrational. I think it's just never been pointed out.

Their own word is the right one

If you spend any time around the longevity world, you'll notice how much weight one word carries: baseline. Get your baseline. Know your numbers before anything goes wrong. Measure now so you can compare later. It's the organizing idea of the whole enterprise, and it's a good idea.

Here's the thing nobody in that world seems to say out loud. If you are over about thirty, you already have a baseline. It was collected over years, by people who were paid to collect it carefully, and it is sitting in three or four institutions that will give you a copy if you ask.

You didn't get it for free. Every one of those labs, notes and scans was billed to someone, and a good deal of it was billed to you. You bought that data. You just don't have a copy of it.

A panel is a snapshot. Your record is the film.

This is the part I'd want you to take away, and it's a clinical point rather than a commercial one.

A hundred biomarkers drawn on a Tuesday tell you where you are on Tuesday. That's genuinely useful — I'll come back to why in a moment. But most of the questions that matter clinically are not what is this value. They're what has this value been doing.

A creatinine of 1.1 means one thing if it has been 1.1 for a decade and something quite different if it was 0.8 two years ago. A slightly enlarged lymph node on a scan is a shrug if it was the same size in 2021 and a phone call if it wasn't. Almost every anxious hour I have spent with a patient over an incidental finding would have been resolved in ninety seconds by a prior study — if anybody could find the prior study.

The panel gives you a point. The record gives you a trajectory. You need both, and only one of them is for sale.

And then there's imaging

I'm a neurosurgeon, so this is the part I feel most strongly about, and I'd feel strongly about it even if I did something else for a living.

No biomarker panel will ever produce your lumbar MRI. There is no blood test that tells you what your spine looked like in 2019, or whether the disc that's bothering you now was bothering you then. That information exists — someone acquired it, a radiologist read it, and an insurer paid for it — and for most people it is sitting on a disc in a drawer or on a server at a facility they visited once.

Imaging is also where the cost of not having your records becomes concrete rather than theoretical. In one trauma series, 21% of transferred patients got a repeat CT scan — and among the documented reasons were that the prior images never arrived, that they were incomplete, or that the disc would not open. When unaffiliated emergency departments could actually exchange records, patients were 59% less likely to receive a redundant CT.

A disc that won't open is not really a technology problem. It's a person getting a second dose of radiation because a piece of plastic failed.

What the panel genuinely does give you

I want to be fair here, because the easy version of this argument is wrong and I don't want to write it.

Testing a hundred biomarkers on a person who feels fine really does find things. It finds thyroid disease, iron deficiency, prediabetes, lipid patterns that nobody had looked for because nobody had a reason to. Ordinary medical care is reactive by design — you generally get tested when something prompts it — and a broad panel is deliberately not reactive. That's a real difference and it's worth something.

So this isn't an argument that the panel is a waste. It's an argument about sequence. If you're about to spend $499 finding out what's true today, it is worth about an hour of your time first to collect what was already true — because it costs almost nothing, it's already yours, and it's the thing that makes today's numbers legible.

Why hasn't this been solved

Reasonably enough, you might assume that someone has. Apple has been building Health Records since 2018, and it works — where the institution participates. Health information exchanges exist. Every hospital has a portal.

And after seven years of that, the share of people using anything at all to combine their records is 7%.

The reason isn't that the technology is hard. It's that the work is boring and distributed: your records live at a hospital, two clinics, an imaging center and an urgent care you went to on holiday, and each of them has its own request process, its own release form, and its own idea of what counts as proof that you are you. Nobody's app fixes that, because it isn't an app problem. It's an errand — and it's an errand almost nobody runs, because it takes weeks and produces nothing you can see until it's finished.

What I'd actually do

1. List where you've been seen. Not where you go now — everywhere, going back as far as you can remember. The urgent care on vacation counts. The imaging center your old doctor sent you to counts.
2. Ask for the actual images, not just the reports. The report is one radiologist's reading. The images are the evidence, and a second reader can reach a different conclusion from them.
3. Get it into one place you control — not a folder in your email, not three portals with forgotten passwords. One place, complete, that travels with you.
4. Then buy the panel, if you want it. It'll mean more against a background than it does alone.

This article is general information, not medical advice. UploMD does not diagnose, interpret results, or recommend treatment. Nothing here should be used to make a medical decision on your own — if something in your records or your test results concerns you, discuss it with a physician.