Everlab preventative health testing puts Australians’ growing obsession with health data under the microscope

There was a time when feeling healthy was enough. Now, we want receipts.

Australians have never had more information about their bodies at their fingertips — and apparently, we can’t get enough of it.

A watch can flag an unusual heart rate, a WHOOP can deliver a recovery score before breakfast, and a smart ring can turn a restless night’s sleep into a collection of graphs, scores and recommendations.

But the latest wave of health technology goes further than tracking how well you slept or how hard you trained. It promises to tell you what may be happening inside your body before you feel anything is wrong.

Blood tests. Scans. Physical assessments. Genetic testing. Years of medical records pulled into one place.

It sounds like an obvious win: find problems earlier, intervene sooner and avoid becoming sick in the first place.

But it prompts a more complicated question.

If technology allows us to know more and more about our bodies, is there a point at which we know too much?

And if this new era of preventative healthcare really can make us healthier, who gets the privilege of accessing it?

The problem with ‘sick care’

Everlab co-founder and chief medical officer Dr Steven Lu has spent much of his career thinking about what happens before someone becomes sick.

After working across cardiothoracic surgery, neurosurgery and intensive care before retraining as a specialist GP, Dr Lu said repeatedly treating patients after something had already gone seriously wrong made him question what could have happened earlier.

“In hospital, a win is, you know, you mitigated some disaster, but are we stopping them from happening in the first place?” he said.

He likens the system to having a fire brigade without paying enough attention to sprinklers and smoke detectors.

“We effectively have a sick care system. We wait for people to get sick, and then you come, and sometimes it’s too late.”

Preventative medicine itself is hardly new.

Blood pressure checks, cancer screenings and routine blood tests have long attempted to identify risks or disease before symptoms emerge.

But what is changing is just how far healthy people can now choose to go looking for something wrong.

Everlab is one of a growing number of businesses meeting the demands of those who want more health information.

Its model brings together doctors, dietitians, exercise physiologists and diagnostics to establish a broader picture of someone’s health before there is a complaint to investigate.

For some customers, that can involve several appointments.

Physical testing can turn things people might ordinarily describe vaguely — feeling fit, strong or healthy — into measurable data.

Results, bloodwork and medical information are then reviewed by a doctor, who discusses the results and develops recommendations around them.

For those on Everlab’s more comprehensive program, the process can be repeated six months later to see what has — or hasn’t — changed.

Establish a baseline. Intervene. Test again.

It sounds logical but there is a very real psychological consequence of turning the human body into data.

When health becomes a score

Wearables have already changed the way many people think about being healthy.

Sleep can be good or bad. Recovery can be green, yellow or red. Exercise produces scores to beat tomorrow.

WHOOP has helped make concepts such as recovery, strain and sleep performance part of everyday health conversations, rather than something considered only when a person becomes unwell.

That information can be useful. But there is also something undeniably competitive about being handed a score.

You can wake up feeling fine, look at your phone and discover that, according to the data, you aren’t.

Add deeper physical testing and clinical benchmarks to the mix, and health can begin to feel like something to succeed at.

A result does not necessarily need to indicate disease to feel like bad news.

A perfectly healthy person can still discover that a number is lower, higher or further from “optimal” than they expected and suddenly, feeling healthy is no longer the only measure.

There is data telling you how well you are doing.

Can you know too much?

Dr Lu does not dismiss that having more information about your body can create anxiety.

“There’s absolutely anxiety. But the anxiety is not with the information,” he said.

“Anxiety is with the outcome and the experience.”

That is why, he argues, testing cannot exist without interpretation.

“You cannot sell scans and diagnostics and blood tests from a vending machine. It needs to be supported, because the information itself doesn’t have all that much meaning.”

In other words, more data does not automatically equal better healthcare.

And even Dr Lu acknowledged there is a limit.

“I could do five fold more diagnostics,” he said, adding there would eventually be “diminishing returns”.

“Let’s not ask questions that have lower value.”

Genetic testing provides perhaps the clearest example.

Learning about a higher genetic risk for a disease could influence monitoring or decisions around modifiable risk factors. But it can also reveal information a person cannot simply change.

“Are we ready to know? Are we asking the right questions?” Dr Lu said.

“Some people will say, ‘I understand what you can help me do. I would still rather not know.’ That’s fine.”

As technology makes it possible to know increasing amounts about the body, choosing not to know may become a healthcare decision in itself.

Is prevention becoming a privilege?

Then comes the uncomfortable part: cost.

Everlab has lowered its entry point, with its Baseline Plan currently priced at $299, including blood testing, health-record retrieval, a doctor consultation and a personalised plan.

But more extensive testing costs considerably more.

Its Diagnostics Program is priced at $1199, while its full Protocol Program is advertised at $2999 and adds further assessments and repeat testing at six months.

Dr Lu argues the cost of healthcare cannot be measured only by what someone pays upfront in dollars.

There is also the cost of navigating illness later — appointments, referrals, delayed treatment, time away from work and, most importantly, the consequences of becoming seriously unwell.

It is a compelling argument.

But spending hundreds — or potentially thousands — of dollars investigating a body that does not feel sick is also a luxury many Australians simply cannot afford.

And it creates an uncomfortable divide.

Those who can afford it can potentially establish more detailed baselines, undergo more extensive testing and return months later to see exactly what has changed.

Those who cannot will continue relying on the conventional health system and the preventative services available through it.

Prevention still matters

And the case for prevention is hardly limited to private healthcare.

The Australian Government’s National Preventive Health Strategy acknowledges health spending is overwhelmingly directed towards treating illness and disease and sets a target for preventative-health investment to reach five per cent of total Commonwealth, state and territory government health expenditure by 2030.

The potential stakes are significant.

About 36 per cent of Australia’s total disease burden in 2024 could theoretically have been avoided or reduced by reducing exposure to the modifiable risk factors included in the Australian Burden of Disease Study.

That doesn’t mean every disease can be prevented, or that more testing is always the answer.

But it does make the question of who gets access to prevention harder to ignore.

Dr Lu’s ultimate recommendation is considerably less complicated, and doesn’t require signing up to Everlab.

“No matter what your age is, get yourself a health check-up,” he said.

“If you’re 25 and you’re on top of the world, make it a priority.”

For all the technology, diagnostics and data surrounding modern preventative health, some of its recommendations remain remarkably unglamorous.

Sleep better. Move more. Build strength. Get appropriate health checks. Know the risks that actually matter.

Then, where appropriate, measure whether those changes worked.

Perhaps that is where the line between useful health information and information overload sits.

The goal does not need to be knowing every possible data point about the body, nor turning health into another scoreboard where every number needs to be perfect.

It is knowing what matters and what can actually be changed.

Because technology increasingly allows healthy people to look deeper, earlier and more often.

The question is no longer simply whether prevention is worthwhile. It is how far people should go looking and whether everyone will have the same opportunity to find out.