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Whoop, the company best known for its screen-free fitness band, continues to expand its domain in the broader healthcare space. Today the company announced that its blood-testing service, Whoop Advanced Labs, will now be available without needing a Whoop membership. Additionally, Whoop Advanced Labs now includes the Galleri test for multi-cancer early detection via biotech company Grail.
Since Whoop launched Advanced Labs last fall, you needed a Whoop membership in order to connect your blood test results with the company’s continuous health monitoring in the Whoop app. Now the lab testing stands on its own as a direct-to-consumer product—continuing the trend of companies like Whoop wanting to grow beyond “wearables” into comprehensive, one-stop-shop health platforms.
How Whoop Advanced Labs works
Advanced Labs is powered by Quest Diagnostics and covers cardiovascular, metabolic, hormonal, and inflammatory health through a menu of panels, some comprehensive, some specialized around specific goals. The process is straightforward on paper: buy a test (Whoop says it starts at roughly $150), schedule your blood draw inside the Whoop app, then visit a local clinic to have your blood drawn. Whoop says mobile at-home draws are coming soon in select regions. Every test is ordered by a licensed healthcare provider, and the resulting report is reviewed by a licensed clinician before it lands in the app with what Whoop describes as “clear, actionable guidance,” rather than just a stack of numbers and reference ranges.
The newly added Galleri test works a bit differently. It’s a single blood draw that screens for a signal shared across more than 50 cancer types, many of which have no standard screening protocol today. To be clear, it detects a signal suggesting cancer may be present, not a diagnosis, and it’s meant to supplement the screenings your doctor already recommends, not replace them. Advanced Labs isn’t currently covered by insurance, though purchases may qualify for HSA or FSA reimbursement, which you should confirm with your plan administrator before you buy.
What to keep in mind
Whoop’s existing user base already skews toward serious athletes and health-optimization enthusiasts, exactly the kind of people primed to want more data about their bodies, whether or not more data is what actually serves their health. Removing the membership requirement widens the pool considerably, but it’s fair to wonder whether everyone buying a $150 test understands what they’re signing up for when the results come back, or if they have a plan for what to do with an unexpected finding.
Comprehensive biomarker panels can provide tons of useful information: an unusually high cholesterol number, a vitamin deficiency, early signs of insulin resistance, and so on. At the same time, they can also generate a pile of borderline or ambiguous results that create worry without a clear next step. Reviewing dozens or over a hundred biomarkers at once increases the odds that something will land outside a “normal” range purely by chance, and not every flagged number translates into meaningful medical action.
Multi-cancer early detection tests like Galleri, in particular, are still a relatively young technology, and consumers should be prepared to speak with a human medical professional about false positives, false negatives, and what a positive signal should actually prompt you to do next. For now, count me among the people watching closely as wearable companies keep edging further into territory that used to belong exclusively to your doctor’s office.
