Could medical intelligence re-shape the healthcare industry?

In theory, increasing our understanding of the context of our biometric data could lead to more effective, timelier interventions and better behavior. In this vein, Function Health has recently rolled out a new Medical Intelligence AI foundation model that contextualizes wellness information from over 160 blood tests, MRI results, medical record notes and wearables.

Jonathan Swerdlin, CEO of Function Health, argues this helps fill in the gaps with existing healthcare approaches and processes:

We’ve lived the gaps in traditional healthcare – the delays, the dismissals, the reactive model that waits for symptoms. So we built Function with the world’s top doctors to put you in control. This is about catching potential issues early, when you can still do something about them. You deserve a deep view of your health as it evolves: more time with the people you love, more moments that matter. Function exists to help make 100 healthy years a reality for everyone.

This is a bold promise, and if it actually delivers and does so cost-effectively, it could fundamentally reshape the future of healthcare. It might take a few years to find out where and how well it delivers. But in the meantime, it’s a rapidly growing business. Function has hundreds of thousands of users and has trained its new AI on over fifty million completed lab tests and wearables data, with clinical guidance from licensed doctors. This has helped it earn a private valuation of over $2.5 billion.

It sits in an interesting middle ground between traditional reactive or overtaxed healthcare that might miss identifying patterns and general-purpose chatbots that might hallucinate or even give dangerous advice. Still, the company’s terms of service clearly states:

FUNCTION DOES NOT OFFER YOU MEDICAL ADVICE, A DIAGNOSIS, MEDICAL TREATMENT, OR ANY FORM OF A MEDICAL OPINION, THROUGH OUR SERVICES OR OTHERWISE. All material, information, data, and content that Function provides through our Services, including without limitation through AI Chat, is strictly for general information purposes.

Swerdlin clarifies:

Function is not meant to replace your doctor; it is meant to make you more knowledgeable about your own body, and therefore more powerful when it comes to transforming your health for the better. Through Function’s innovative tools and offerings, members can approach their physician with the information in hand to discuss any concerns, outline proactive strategies, and take control of their health, rather than just reacting when symptoms arise.

A growing field

Function is an early leader in a growing field of health information tools that walk an interesting line between offering an “advanced health check” but don’t offer medical advice. But at only $365 a year and a better user experience for explaining results, it can help monitor early indicators of thousands of diseases related to hormones, cancer, heart disease, aging, mental health and focus.

Competitors include other startups such as InsideTracker, Empirical Health, and SiPhox Health. It also used to include Forward Health, which folded in late 2024 after an overambitious expansion plan for replacing its diagnostic lab partner model with fully automated health pods. Regardless, it’s a rapidly growing industry, and Function has maintained close relationships with its lab partners. Swerdlin argues that Function has several key advantages over these competitors:

Function is the only platform that combines advanced lab testing and imaging powered by FDA-cleared AI under one membership. All data is integrated into a single intelligent interface, giving members a deeper view of their health and empowering informed decisions.

The basic package gives members access to 160+ biomarker tests twice a year, covering heart, hormones, thyroid, liver, kidneys, nutrients, inflammation, heavy metals, and cancer signals. For another $499, members can also take a 22-minute FDA-cleared full-body scan designed to detect cancers, aneurysms, endometriosis, stroke signs, and CT scans for lung cancer and heart plaque. This is actually a big deal since it took that long just for an MRI of my knee a few years ago.

Another essential differentiator is the Medical Intelligence Lab, which brings together a team of top clinicians, researchers, and technologists, co-directed by Dan Sodickson, M.D., Ph.D., Function’s Chief Medical Scientist. The user experience is curated by Chief Product and Technology Officer Ziad Sultan, who previously led personalization at Spotify and served as a product lead for Google News.

Swerdlin explains:

AI alone is not enough to understand and manage one’s health. The MI Lab focuses on leveraging AI to develop Medical Intelligence – a system designed to achieve the deepest view of each person’s unique biology by unifying data from lab testing, imaging, wearables, IoT devices, and medical records, integrating it with global medical research and the expertise of leading clinicians.

A private AI chat lets users ask questions and receive responses informed by their health data. Function is also developing evidence-based protocols for members to understand the steps they can put into practice immediately within the context of their health data and goals.

The service is mostly delivered through a chat interface and an actionable dashboard. However, Function has also implemented a process in which members receive a phone call from clinicians about selected test results that may signal bad news.

If all goes according to plan, they hope to fuse AI with medical expertise to empower eight billion people with a medical operating system that lets them take control of their health and get ahead of disease. This will leverage its extensive tracking system, combined with continuous integration of global research, scientific discoveries, and best practices, to detect early warning signals, spot patterns unique to each individual, and provide a roadmap for living a hundred healthy years.

My take

I really want to believe in this aspirational vision of better data and experimentation informed by AI, leading to a better life for myself, my family, and not to mention the other eight billion humans. I also felt the same way when I bought the Fitbit, Garmin health watch, Oura Ring, connected scale, and connected blood pressure monitor, which have been sitting on the shelf, unused, for several months. Come to think of it, I am still spending about $5.99 a month on that Oura Ring service, which is now powered by AI.

I stopped wearing the gadgets because they were making me feel anxious about achieving my anxiety, stress, energy and health goals. Maybe this time it will be different. I certainly hope so. For what it’s worth, I always seem to be experimenting with new protocols, some that work out and most don’t, which I generally decide within a few weeks by looking for any slight changes for better or worse.

Maybe I would get better insight with a more comprehensive battery of tests every six months, but by then I would have already tried and abandoned a bunch of things in the process. My friend, who is a bit like me, decided to experiment with increasing his calcium intake after suffering from some hip issues, since calcium is a key ingredient in bone and cartilage. Unfortunately, a prostate biomarker spiked after that, which ended up being a bad thing. I have been way more cautious since then.

I also remember subscribing to Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D.’s health blog, a former Cleveland Clinic physician who is now Chief Medical Officer at Function. This occurred after reading about some really profound connection that seemed important at the time. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was.

Some critics, including Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society (who is not a doctor), have raised ethical concerns that can arise when functional medical advocates like Hyman both suggest protocols and sell the cure. Also, some actual doctors in Denmark are concerned that the tendency for doctors in general to order more diagnostic tests can increase downstream medical costs with no measurable improvement in general health outcomes. The issue is that any given test can indicate a false positive 5% of the time, and when you stack just twenty together, patients have a 50% chance of seeing at least one abnormal result.

But heck, that was in 2022, long before the real explosion in AI and agentic innovation. Things are different now. I certainly hope so. My wife keeps complaining about tiredness, and none of the mere twenty blood tests the NHS has given her can tell her why. Maybe Function Health or one of these other services could finally help us get to the bottom of this.

Aside from insight into the root causes of our problems and the protocols for ameliorating them, there is also an opportunity to learn how to design better user experiences to realize our wellness goals. One interesting direction to explore has been the success in Motivational Interviewing. This sort of reverses the dominant paradigm of telling people what’s wrong with them and how to fix it by inspiring people to argue for their own change. I am not clear what that might look like in practice, but if done well, it might provide a way to promote useful change without also increasing anxiety.