A new PowerPlug puts a person’s medical history beside their Ring readings and flags follow-ups that may have slipped through.
The average doctor’s appointment in the US lasts 15 minutes, according to Ultrahuman. That’s barely long enough to explain what’s bothering you, let alone a medical history scattered across a handful of clinics, hospitals and labs that may never have swapped notes.
Ultrahuman would like to help with that. The wearables company has launched the HealthEx PowerPlug, an add-on inside its app that pulls a person’s medical records in and sets them next to data from the Ultrahuman Ring. It was built with HealthEx, a platform that lets people collect their records and pass them on to apps, providers or health plans they trust [1].
The PowerPlug began rolling out in the US on 17 September for Ring users. It costs $4.99 a month or $45.99 a year (the yearly plan works out cheaper than twelve monthly payments) and sits in the PowerPlugs tab on the app dashboard. People who only want their history gathered in one place can use HealthEx Wallet, which is free directly from HealthEx.
Setup starts with identity verification. HealthEx then goes looking for records across the places a person has received care, using a national record-sharing framework called TEFCA to reach providers around the country. Members choose which care sites to pull from and actively consent to sharing. They can stop whenever they like.
Once the data arrives, the PowerPlug maps 532 conditions, medications and procedures from those electronic records into the app. Ring readings (resting heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature and deep sleep) run on the same timeline. So a new diagnosis or a new prescription lands right beside what the body was doing around it.
What the app does with all that
There are three main features. The timeline is the first, and the second is a hunt for follow-ups that slipped. Results and medications appear with their dates, and if something in the record implies a marker that hasn’t been checked, or a follow-up interval has lapsed, the app turns that into a question for the next appointment. Think of a medication that’s meant to come with a periodic check, and a check that never happened. The PowerPlug is built to notice that kind of gap.
The third feature is the Visit Pack, a doctor-ready summary of what’s in the record and which medications a person is taking, tied to their wearable data. It also suggests questions and tests worth raising in the room.
Notice how much of this is worded as questions. Ultrahuman describes the PowerPlug as a general wellness feature. It is not a medical device, and it does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. The company also says it is no substitute for professional medical care.
The pitch from Ultrahuman is fairly direct.
“In the US, people visit multiple care providers a year, and key follow-ups and tests are missed because nobody has all the information they need,” said Mohit Kumar, CEO and founder of Ultrahuman. “Our partnership with HealthEx fundamentally changes that. It puts crucial health records in one place, and adds context to Ring measurements.”
HealthEx’s co-founder and CEO comes at it from the clinic side.
“A medical record captures what happened at the visit, and Ultrahuman shows how the body responds every day after it. When members choose to connect the two through HealthEx, they arrive at their next appointment with the most complete health picture, helping them arrive better prepared for that conversation,” said Dr Priyanka Agarwal, MBA, co-founder and CEO of HealthEx.
A longer view of one person’s health
For longevity, the interesting part is the long view. Most of what decides how well someone ages plays out slowly, over years. A blood marker drifts in one direction, or a medication gets changed and never reviewed again. Neither shows up neatly in a 15-minute visit, and both are easy to lose when the data lives in several different systems.
A ring captures the days in between while the record holds the visits, and together they give you something closer to a long baseline for one person. That’s the sort of thing early detection tends to lean on.
There are fair caveats. The release doesn’t claim the PowerPlug improves health outcomes, and it doesn’t say how complete a person’s records usually are when they arrive (a timeline is only as good as what flows into it). It’s US-only for now, and it’s another subscription on top of the ring.
Privacy matters more than usual when the data is a medical history. Ultrahuman and HealthEx both say they don’t sell member health data, use it for advertising or use it to train AI models.
Deeper links with Ultrahuman’s Vitamin D, GLP-1 and Respiratory Health PowerPlugs are listed as coming soon. If those arrive as described, the records may end up shaping a good deal more of the app than follow-up reminders.
Images courtesy of Ultrahuman/HealthEx
[1] https://www.healthex.io/press/healthex-ultrahuman-partnership
