How we check every reference range on the platform, and what that means for your results
A reference range is the band that decides whether a value on your lab report reads as normal, borderline, or worth a closer look. It is the thing that turns a number into a meaning.
Most people never think about reference ranges, which is exactly why we think about them a great deal.
We read every range out of the running system
Reference ranges are straightforward to get right in a document and considerably harder to keep right in software. A range can be described correctly in a specification and behave differently in the product, and nobody would know unless someone went and checked the product itself.
So that is what we do. Every reference range on the MyHealthspan platform has been read directly out of the running system rather than from any document describing it. That is 153 biomarkers, resolved into 382 separate sex and age specific bands, each one held against published reference data by our clinical team under co-founder and practicing oncologist Dr. Zia Poonja.
Documentation is where errors hide. The system is where they live. We check the system.
Hormones are where this matters most
For plenty of markers, one band genuinely does fit everyone, and pretending otherwise would be false precision.
For others it does not, and hormones are the clearest case. Healthy SHBG, sex hormone binding globulin, runs meaningfully higher in women than in men, and it shifts with age. The same is true of DHEA-S. Both are read against ranges specific to your sex and your age, so a value that is entirely normal for a woman in her fifties reads as normal, rather than being measured against somebody else's baseline.
Every range on the platform also lives in a single source of truth. One definition per marker, used everywhere that marker appears, so what you see on your dashboard, in your report and in your plan cannot drift apart from each other.
Fasting is part of the reading
Glucose and triglycerides behave differently depending on whether you have eaten. A non-fasted glucose read against a fasted range looks worse than it is. A fasted result read against a non-fasted range does the opposite.
Your report is marked fasted or non-fasted, and the ranges adjust accordingly. Same blood, same lab, but the standard now matches how you actually took the test.
A flag that means something
Alongside your results, our clinical and coaching team sees a review flag on any value the system cannot independently verify, most often because a lab has reported it in an unfamiliar unit.
Units across the platform were reconciled as part of the same audit, so that flag now appears when there is genuinely something to check and stays quiet when there is not. A flag that fires constantly is a flag nobody reads, which makes it worse than no flag at all.
Bring your history with you, and check it before it lands
Most people arrive with history. Bloodwork from a family doctor, a panel from a few years back, a scan from a clinic.
You can upload those reports as PDFs. Here is the part that matters. Before anything is saved to your profile, the app shows you what it read from the document. Your name, your date of birth, and every individual value. You confirm it, or you correct it. Nothing enters your record on the strength of an automated read alone.
Reports written in French are read correctly too, including the ones that use a comma as a decimal separator.
Why we treat this as clinical work
Reference ranges decide what reads as healthy on your report. They are not a display setting and they are not an engineering detail. Our clinical team sets every one of them from published reference data, and you can see the range applied to each of your values.
That is what doctor-founded and AI-native looks like in practice. The automation does the reading. A licensed clinician decides what that reading should be measured against. And we check the whole set, marker by marker, band by band, rather than assuming it is right because it was right when it was written.
Unlock more years of life.
Questions we have been asked
Can I see which range was applied to a specific value? Yes. Open any biomarker in My Data and the range applied to it is shown alongside your value.
Are ranges applied when my blood is drawn, or when I look at my results? When you look. Ranges are applied at the moment your results are displayed rather than fixed at upload, which means your existing values always show against the current range set.
Author
As Co-Founder and CEO of Healthspan, a health tech startup focused on the longevity health space, I'm on a mission to extend healthspan and lifespan by decades, not years.
