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Innovation

WellnessFX launches with a platform that can help you lead a healthier life

Written by Boonsri Dickinson, Contributing Editor

Now you can manage your health online, through a service called WellnessFX which aims to serve as a dashboard into your health. WellnessFX launches tomorrow at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

For beta users, a trained professional will be sent to your home to collect blood and saliva samples. The results will reveal your biomarkers, which are visualized on your WellnessFX account. The new platform may be a window into your health, the way Facebook provides a glimpse into your social life and preferences.

When the appropriate partnerships are set up, all the various self-tracking tools will integrate data from your Withthings scale and data from your Zeo and much more. Your blood work will also be included in the analysis. That way, diagnostic and consumer tools can be paired with nutritional and supplemental product choices.

WellnessFX wants to manage all that health data for you. Your blood work measures your biomarkers, which provide information about your current biological state such as pathogenic processes as well as pharmacologic responses.

Doctors like Harlan Matles and pharmacists like Doctor Ross Pelton are both advisers to WellnessFX and in their practitioner network. Through consultations and virtual interactions, the doctors in the network suggest recommendations such as the types of vitamins an individual should take or what dosage of drug is appropriate for the individual based on their current biological state.

Zak Holdsworth, in charge of the company's business and development, showed me his profile, which visualizes the data put into the platform. Most of his profile is green, which is good. It means Holdsworth is a healthy guy. However, he does have a few red areas. The system provided nutritional and lifestyle recommendations for Holdsworth to follow.

"My Homocysteine was high, so the recommendation was to take some vitamin B-6, B-12 and some Folic Acid. Or a simple B complex vitamin such as this New Chapter one," Holdsworth said.

The popular genetics company 23andMe paved the way for companies like WellnessFX by educating customers about personalized medicine.

Kean founded the network that provided the backbone for WebMD's consumer health business. I see WellnessFX as the new WebMD, a hipper one if you will. It combines social media with advice from some leading doctors, all based on your own personal information. Remember it took 23andMe several years to get 100,000 or more customers, so it will be interesting to see the adoption rate of a service like WellnessFX.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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