Austin—Now that we consumers are used to tracking our steps and sleep via our wrists, health IT startup EverlyWell wants to take health tracking a little deeper.
The Austin, TX-based company sells what it calls “health and wellness tests”—at-home assays that check hormone levels, blood sugar, cholesterol, and more—that can help a person learn more about his or her health. Customers provide a urine, blood, or saliva sample, as required by the test, and receive the results in five days, says Julia Cheek, EverlyWell’s founder and CEO.
“This is not a substitute for sharing with your primary care physician, but it does go more in depth beyond activity and sleep tracking,” she says.
EverlyWell was founded in June 2015 and raised a $2.5 million seed round in February. In May, the startup began beta testing its products, offering eight tests that range in cost from $79 to $399. These tests measure food sensitivity, thyroid activity, and cholesterol, as well as “sleep and stress,” the presence of heavy metals in the body, and women’s health and fertility.
Customers request a kit from the startup’s website, and the request is then authorized by a member of EverlyWell’s physician network, Cheek says. That network also reviews the test results, she adds.
“We then take the reports and translate the HL7 language that is typically used in lab reports and standardize the language and share easy-to-understand results,” she says.
For example, a customer that has sent in a sample for a food allergy test will get results listed on a dashboard on EverlyWell’s site that lists the foods for which there is an allergy, along with a suggested game plan for how to eliminate those irritants from your diet.
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