The Ultimate Vital Sign
Believing you are healthy and knowing you are healthy are two vastly different things. The push for people to live healthier lives has never been stronger. Checking, monitoring, and gauging common vital signs like blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, pulse oximetry, and pain has never been easier. Technology has taken procedures that would have required a nurse or a doctor to perform 5 years ago and has shifted that ability to a small device on Amazon for $15.99, with free 2-day shipping. Democratizing access to basic health has arrived.
However, with all that access to health data — like anything, there is a law of diminishing return. People have bought health trackers and downloaded apps that had cool graphics and engaging interfaces and really used it for 1 week. But now we’ve reached a critical mass where our health tracking devices are just a pool of data that we only look at by accident when we click the wrong app. Too much data is a bad thing and almost worse than no data at all. There is a certain level of security that comes with wearing a health tracker, logging your diet, or tracking activity metrics; however, collecting data is merely a pretense of healthy living. Collecting the correct information and discerning what it means is far more valuable than having a spreadsheet of 300 health data points getting sent to your phone each day.
Plus® was started in an attempt to make the complexity and amount of health data easier for my patients to understand. We were combining vital health information, flexibility, pain, x-ray diagnoses, lab tests, and a few others into a simple health metric that would give a breakdown for actionable interventions. This allowed the patients to spend 2 seconds looking at data and know instantly what needed to be done to improve their health.
Plus® morphed into a more sophisticated algorithm that combined over 100 health & fitness data points. We realized that only tracking health data is irrelevant if the patient had no function in their daily lives. This is why we combine information about vital health, flexibility, advanced imaging and lab tests, activity, strength, and other durability metrics like posture, pain, and previous injuries. We want people to be healthy, but also functioning at a high level. Your pulse and blood pressure can be top notch, but if you live a sedentary life — you are not healthy or you won’t be for much longer. Physiology is the combination of health & fitness and we believe mapping physiology/function is far more valuable for people to track. Our Plus rating algorithm makes determining this much simpler and far more useful.
We want people to spend less than 5 seconds on our platform but get more information than a 30-minute visit with their doctor. Health is not hard, but for years it took a medical professional or hours on google to find out what is truly going on with your health. We believe the Plus Rating will become the “Ultimate Vital Sign” for people to quickly understand where the problem is and have an actionable plan to correct it.
To get your first rating requires a lot of data entry, but if done correctly it can be the most useful metric you will ever have for your health and fitness. If you are passionate about living a healthier life or being in better shape this year — Plus® is exactly what you need.
To get started, email me at drmike@prototypeclinic.com
