HealthOS takes the health data you already have — your Apple Health history, and (if you have them) lab results, wearables, and MRI, CT or X-ray scans — and turns it into a plain-language feed of what's worth paying attention to, that you can ask questions about. It runs entirely on your own Mac.
You'll be asked for the username and password that whoever invited you sent separately — that's what unlocks the download.
Download for MacMost of the steps below are quick. The two slow parts are your iPhone building the Health export, and then the first scan of a large export, which keeps running for a while after you start it.
Before you start
HealthOS-arm64.dmg to open it. A window appears with
the HealthOS app in it. Drag the app onto Applications — that's in the left-hand
column of any Finder window, under Favourites. That window doesn't have an Applications shortcut
of its own, so you do have to drag it across. Keep it in Applications so the rest of these steps
match.HealthOS asks where to store your data — pick a folder (a spot in your Documents, or an external drive, both work). Your health data itself lives only in that folder — and so does any key you paste in later, in a hidden settings file inside it. (Worth knowing if you ever copy or share that folder: the key travels with it.) Two small housekeeping files sit outside it, in your Mac's own Library folder: a note of which folder you picked, and a log of what the app did. Neither holds your health records. It only asks once, and you can move it later with Change data folder in the app window; the old folder is left alone.
It sets up — usually about a minute, sometimes a couple on a slow or external drive — then opens your browser automatically to a short setup wizard. Just follow it; you don't need to come back to the app window. If it ever gives up waiting, you get a small dialog with a Retry button rather than sitting there frozen.
The easiest first input is your Apple Health export:
export.zip.If you have other kinds of data, you can add those too. Each one has its own Reveal folder button, and all of it is optional — add it now or years from now.
Day-to-day numbers from your watch and phone can keep flowing in automatically if you use the iPhone app Health Auto Export. Its button behaves a little differently from the others: it opens the folder in iCloud Drive that the iPhone app writes into, rather than a folder inside your data folder, because HealthOS picks the files up from there.
Blood test results go in as a plain text table — one line for each thing that was
measured (each "analyte", meaning one substance the lab looked at, like cholesterol or vitamin D) on
each date it was measured. The file is a .tsv whose name ends in
_longform.tsv. If you have lab results in some other shape, ask whoever invited you
rather than guessing.
.vcf.gz, aligned to GRCh37/b37 — a 23andMe or array chip won't do, it miscalls) and
the basic findings show up straight away. The deep read — screening your whole genome for
pathogenic variants and working out which medications your genes affect — is an optional
advanced step under Settings → Genome (advanced). It needs Docker and a one-time
reference download of about 27 GB, so it's a sit-down job rather than a five-minute one. The panel
walks you through it, and there's a separate step-by-step guide. Skip
it if you just want the rest of HealthOS — everything else works without it.Scans work differently. MRI, CT and X-ray images aren't dropped into a folder — you
upload them inside the app, on the Imaging tab, once it's open. It takes PNG, JPEG, HEIC, PDF,
or DICOM — that's the format hospitals and imaging centres give you on a disc or download,
either as a single .dcm file or a .zip holding a whole series of slices.
Size limits are 30 MB for an image or PDF, 300 MB for a DICOM file or zip. You pick the body part and
side each time; both are required.
If you've added an AI key (Step 4), an upload can also get an AI second read — a note from Claude pointing out things it thinks are worth a closer look, on top of the scan itself. Three things quietly switch that read off, and one more is just worth knowing:
The daily feed works on its own, with no key. Claude is what powers the parts that need to read or write in words, and each of those bills to your own key. The main ones are Ask (chat with your data), the second read on a scan you upload, transcribing a radiology report PDF, and building a supplement timetable. There are smaller ones too: summarising research papers you pull and rating how relevant each one is, giving each new Ask conversation a title, and the Run checks button on the Ops screen. That's the shape of it rather than an exhaustive list — assume anything that reads or writes in sentences is going through your key.
Worth knowing: several of these run on their own rather than on a button you press. Uploading a scan or a report PDF starts the read straight away, and pulling a research paper summarises and rates it straight away. While a key is set there is no per-upload switch — every scan and report you upload is read.
Settings also has an optional Voyage AI key, for search that matches on meaning rather than exact words. With it set, the app also sends the titles and abstracts of research papers you pull — public text, not yours — to Voyage so they can be searched that way, and Ask may run one of those searches partway through answering you. Your own findings, notes and files are not sent to Voyage. Skip the key if you'd rather not involve a second company at all.
Want them? Get a key from console.anthropic.com and paste it into the wizard's AI features step. Don't want them? Skip it — everything else still works. You can add a key later in Settings.
If something's off
The download asks for a username and password.
That's the gate — use the ones whoever invited you sent. If you don't have them, ask them.
macOS won't let me open the app.
Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and click Open Anyway next to HealthOS. On macOS 14 and earlier, right-click HealthOS → Open → Open. That works for almost everyone, and it's the only step you should normally need.
If it still refuses, first check the app is actually in your Applications folder — none of this works while it's still sitting in the window the download opened. If it is, and macOS is still blocking it, there's one last resort that involves typing a line into Terminal. You do not need to understand Terminal to do this, and you shouldn't need it at all — if you'd rather not, just ask whoever invited you instead.
Press Command-Space, type Terminal, and press Return. A window with text in
it opens. Copy this line in and press Return:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/HealthOS.app. All it does is
remove the "downloaded from the internet" label macOS attached to the app, which is what's making it
suspicious. Then close Terminal and open HealthOS again.
Does my data go anywhere?
With no AI key, none of your health data leaves your Mac. HealthOS keeps everything in the folder you chose, and all the ordinary parts still work — your files still import, the feed still fills in, and you can still upload and view scans. You just don't get the AI reads.
Two things do reach the internet even with no keys, and neither one carries anything about you. The app checks this site for a version number so it can tell you an update exists. And the Pull research button on the Peptides tab sends that peptide's name to two public research databases, ClinicalTrials.gov and ChEMBL, to fetch what's published about it.
If you add your own Anthropic key, more goes out, all of it to Claude and all of it billed to you. Uploading a scan or a radiology report PDF sends that file to be read, and that happens as part of the upload rather than as a separate step you press — while a key is set there is no per-upload switch, so every scan and report you upload is read. Ask sends your question plus whatever parts of your data it looks up to answer it, and separately sends the opening of each new conversation to come up with a title for it. Building a supplement timetable sends the list of what you take, plus timing notes worked out from your labs and genetics — not your raw lab numbers and not your genome file. Pulling a research paper sends that paper's text to be summarised and rated for relevance, automatically. The Run checks button on the Ops screen runs a batch of test questions through Claude.
If you also add a Voyage key, the titles and abstracts of research papers you pull go to Voyage AI so they can be indexed — that's public text, not yours. Ask can then run a meaning-based search over them while answering, which sends its search wording (composed from your question) to Voyage too. Your own findings, notes and files are not indexed or sent there.
Your genome, lab and wearable files are never uploaded in bulk. If you'd rather nothing was sent at all, leave the keys blank. If you've already set one and want it gone, use the Remove button next to it in Settings — and whether or not you do, you can revoke the key itself at console.anthropic.com, which kills it immediately and everywhere, including in a copy of HealthOS you've stopped using.
Is this for Windows or Intel Macs?
This build is for Apple Silicon Macs (M1-M4). If that's not you, tell whoever invited you.