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You Have the Data. What Do You Do Next?
Here is the question almost no health data answers: what do you actually do on Monday morning?
You have the results. You have read them, looked up the odd-sounding ones, perhaps asked an AI to explain the rest. You understand them better than you did. Then the week starts. Do you change breakfast? Walk more? Lift something heavy? Drink less? Book a GP appointment? Retest in three months? Do nothing at all?
That gap, between having information and knowing what to do with it, is where most people get stuck. After thirty years in integrative health practice, I would say it is the single most common place the whole thing stalls.
We solved the wrong problem first
We may have access to more personal health information than any generation in history. Blood panels, blood pressure, resting heart rate, sleep staging, body composition, continuous glucose, genetic and hormone panels, microbiome sequencing, DEXA scans, and a watch quietly logging oxygen saturation and heart-rate variability while you sleep.
Getting hold of health data used to be the hard part. It isn’t any more. The hard part now is knowing what any of it means for you.
Picture a blood test with forty biomarkers on it. Two or three are flagged. The rest are not. Several sit right at the edge of a laboratory reference range, a fact the report presents without comment. So you look one up. One site says you’re fine. Another says you’re suboptimal. A podcast tells you something else entirely, with enormous confidence. Twenty minutes later you have considerably more information than you started with, and considerably less clarity.
Data is not understanding. Understanding is not action.
Your health story is scattered across a dozen places
Your GP holds one set of records. A private laboratory holds another. Your watch has activity and heart rate, your scales have body composition, a hospital may have imaging, a testing company has its own dashboard, and somewhere in your inbox are PDFs from tests you had forgotten about.
Any one piece tells you a little. Together they tell a story, and the story is usually worth more than any single result inside it.
Take fasting glucose that reads 4.7, then 5.0, then 5.3, then 5.5, then 5.7 mmol/L across five years. Every one of those results is technically within range. Every one, taken alone, is reassuring. The sequence is an entirely different conversation. The same holds for blood pressure, triglycerides, muscle mass, kidney and liver markers, inflammatory markers, hormones, fitness and sleep.
Health is not a snapshot. It is a trajectory.
Navigation, rather than more noise
This is the thinking behind Health SatNav, the platform I’m building at Soma Health Life. Bring the information into one place. Show where you are. Flag what may deserve attention. Then offer practical considerations for what to do next, across food, movement, sleep, supplements, medication, mental wellbeing, environment, social connection, and where appropriate a conversation with a healthcare professional.
A satnav is the comparison I keep returning to, because it gets the division of labour right. It improves your awareness and leaves the driving to you. It offers a route, and you decide whether to take it. Turn left instead of right and it simply recalculates.
Health should work in much the same way.
What AI actually adds
AI makes this practical in a way it wasn’t five years ago. It is exceptionally good at working across large volumes of information, recognising patterns, explaining complexity in plain language, and letting you keep asking follow-up questions until something makes sense.
That is a genuinely different job from the one a clinician does. Done properly it should make clinical time more valuable, not less, because you arrive with better questions and a clearer picture of your own history.
What becomes possible is a continuously evolving picture of one person’s health, assembled from many sources, showing how things are changing over time.
Most people have only ever encountered healthcare at the point where something has gone wrong. This is a chance to move upstream, toward awareness, prevention and genuine participation.
Make the numbers answer the questions people actually have
People do not need another dashboard full of numbers. They need those numbers turned into answers. What looks good? What is changing? What deserves attention? What should I raise with my doctor? What can I reasonably work on myself? What should I keep an eye on?
And underneath all of them, the Monday morning question. What do I do next?
We already have more health data than any generation before us. Making it useful is the interesting part.
If you’ve had a test result in the past year, did it change anything you actually did? I’d like to hear either way.
Matthew Clarke is Founder & CEO of Soma Health Life and the creator of Health SatNav. He practised as a Naturopath at Complete Health Medical Centre, Melbourne, and has over thirty years in integrative health.