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Summary
On episode 414 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with David Korsunsky, the founder of Heads Up Health, a service he built after growing frustrated with disjointed medical records, underused health tracking technology, and health data that was abundant but poorly managed.
David explains why he built a personal health record that pulls together lifestyle data, clinical labs, and functional testing into one dashboard, and why that centralization is what finally let him and his users spot patterns their own doctors couldn't see.
The conversation also covers how the platform handles HIPAA and data privacy, and how health coaches and functional practitioners use the same data to personalize care.
Links
- https://headsuphealth.com
Key Takeaways
- Centralizing your health data reveals patterns your doctor can't see. David built a spreadsheet from records held by four different doctors and immediately saw multi-year trends across his labs that no single provider had visibility into, because each one only held a fragment of his medical history.
- Consumer wearables now do what used to require a hospital visit. Devices like Oura, Whoop, and Biostrap track heart rate variability, sleep, and cardiovascular load with a Bluetooth sensor, the kind of biofeedback that needed specialized lab equipment just ten years ago.
- Health data breaks into three buckets: lifestyle, clinical, and functional. Lifestyle data is what you track at home (weight, blood sugar, sleep). Clinical data comes from your doctor's blood work. Functional data covers deeper testing like heavy metals, mold exposure, microbiome, and genetics, most useful for people with tougher, unresolved health issues.
- Bio-individuality means identical inputs can produce different outputs. Two people can sleep the same number of hours and drink the same glass of orange juice, and one person's blood sugar spikes over 100 while the other's stays flat. Only your own tracked data shows you which camp you're in.
- The most engaged users aren't the most tech-savvy, they're the most motivated. Heads Up Health's busiest users are people managing a real health issue, not gadget enthusiasts. Simple dashboards with big numbers and easy charts let them connect cause and effect themselves, like testing blood sugar after pizza versus after a low-carb dinner.
- Patient-initiated data sharing changes how HIPAA applies. Because Heads Up Health is a personal health record owned by the individual, inviting a doctor to view your data is treated differently under HIPAA than a doctor requesting it directly. The company also runs on HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and was working toward the stricter HITRUST certification.
- The business model is the subscription, not your data. David was direct that the company does not sell or use personal data for marketing. Revenue comes strictly from monthly subscriptions, which removes any incentive to monetize what users track.
- Practitioners use the same data to personalize a treatment plan. Health coaches, functional doctors, and cash-pay practitioners can pull up years of a client's labs and lifestyle data in a single consult instead of starting from scratch, letting them tailor recommendations instead of guessing.
- David's three strategies to get and stay well: regulate your blood sugar and metabolism first, since most chronic illness is metabolic in nature; get measured, high-quality sleep rather than relying on how rested you feel; and build real community and spiritual connection, ways of giving and receiving love.
“It's yours. You share it with whoever you want, and that's how we run the business. We're not in the business of making money on people's data.”
David Korsunsky