Most labs have an app or a patient portal today, and they work well for what they're meant to do: show the result of the test you took there, as soon as it's ready. The question worth asking is a different one - what happens when you want to see how things have changed, and not just today's result.
What your lab's app does well
- It delivers your results quickly, without you having to go looking for them.
- It shows the signed report, which is the official document.
- It keeps the history of the tests you took at that lab.
Where it stops
It only knows what went through it. If you had your 2024 labs done at one place, your 2025 labs at another because that's what your insurance covered, and this year's at a third one near home, you have three separate histories and no timeline. And it's the timeline that answers the question that matters: is my ferritin going up or down?
Then there's everything that isn't a blood test. Body composition scans, imaging reports, prescriptions, what your watch measures every day - none of it goes through the lab, and each one ends up in a different app or a different drawer.
What Biomapa does
It starts from the PDF. You upload the report - from any lab, recent or from years ago - and it reads the biomarkers, organizes them with their reference ranges and lines them up next to your earlier results. What you get is a timeline that crosses labs, because once the data has been read, it no longer matters where the file came from.
And it takes the rest: body composition, imaging reports, medications, meals, workouts and your watch data. The idea is to have one place for all of it when you need the full picture.
Not one replacing the other
Your lab's app remains the source of the official report, and it's where the PDF comes from. Biomapa is the layer on top, where reports from different places become a history. One delivers the document; the other answers what changed.
What changes in practice
The difference becomes clear at your appointment. With separate lab apps, you show up with three apps open, hunting for the right test in each one while your doctor waits. With your history in one place, the question changes from "where is my 2024 test" to "what has changed since 2024".
There's also what happens when you switch labs for good. Your old history still exists in the previous lab's app, but you stop opening that app - and in practice it disappears. A test you took and paid for becomes data you never look at again.
How to bring your old history along
- 1Gather the PDFs you already have - from your email or from each lab's app or patient portal - or take a photo of the paper copy if it's an old one.
- 2Upload each one. They don't need to be in order: the date comes from the report itself.
- 3Check the values that were read. An old scanned report sometimes comes out with a blurry number, and it's worth checking before it becomes part of your history.
A test from ten years ago is worth adding. It's exactly that distant point that shows a trend - the difference between "my cholesterol went up" and "my cholesterol has been in the same place since 2016".
It's worth saying what neither of them does: diagnose. Biomapa organizes your data and shows how it changes. Interpreting results is the job of the health professional who takes care of you.