The Pulse: WHOOP’S New CMO Dr. Ami Bhatt On Closing the Gap Between Measurement and Medicine

Dr. Ami Bhatt has always advocated for moving care beyond the four walls of a doctor’s office. As the new CMO of WHOOP, she believes continuous consumer health data is the new front door. 

Healthcare has long called the moment a patient leaves the hospital "the last mile." Dr. Ami Bhatt thinks that framing is backwards.

A cardiologist specializing in adult congenital heart disease at Mass General Hospital, Bhatt went on to serve as chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology and as inaugural chair of the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee. Bhatt has consistently innovated to push healthcare outside of the traditional walls. And she’s done that from nearly every vantage point. 

Now she's testing that idea at scale. This year, WHOOP, the $10.1 billion-valued wearable company, named her as its first chief medical officer. Bhatt is seeing how the wearable giant is becoming a consumer health company of its own, with 2.5 million members globally to prove it. 

In a Q+A for HLTH's The Pulse, Bhatt discusses what drew her to WHOOP, why more biomarker data isn't the goal, and why she believes preventive testing has failed to reach women.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

HLTH: What drew you to join WHOOP after your various roles in healthcare, including your work as the Chair of the inaugural Digital Health Advisory Committee? 

Bhatt: For more than two decades, I have been working on the same question from different rooms: how do you get rigorous care all the way to the person in the community where they live? I asked it as a cardiologist sitting with patients, then in national cardiology leadership, and later in advisory work on how digital tools should be evaluated before they reach the public. Each role showed me a different part of the same problem. Some of the hardest challenges in healthcare are not scientific. They are about delivery, trust, and what happens after information reaches a patient.

At some point, you have to decide whether to keep describing that gap or help close it. That is what drew me to WHOOP. There is continuous measurement at real scale, a commitment to clinical rigor, and millions of people who are already deeply engaged in understanding their own physiology.

That engagement matters. Good medicine is not simply giving someone information. It is helping them understand it, act on it, and feel more agency over their health. I see what I am doing at WHOOP as an extension of the work I have always done in medicine.

What should Whoop users know about Advanced Labs and what are some of the most interesting findings from your recent research? 

For me, the most important takeaway is that people can feel healthy and still learn something important from their blood work. Advanced Labs can help people find things they may not have known to look for, follow up with their doctor when needed, and make more informed decisions about their health.

Advanced Labs gives people access to more than 120 biomarkers across cardiovascular, metabolic, hormonal and inflammatory health, including markers that are not routinely included in a standard panel.

What has been especially interesting is what we are seeing in the data from thousands of WHOOP members using Advanced Labs. More than one in three women with a normal complete blood count still had depleted iron stores. Nearly one in seven had elevated Lp(a), an inherited marker associated with increased cardiovascular risk that is not part of a standard cholesterol panel. Nearly one in 12 had HbA1c levels in the prediabetes range, and we are also seeing thyroid markers outside the standard reference range in both women and men.

We are also adding GRAIL’s Galleri test, which looks for cancer signals associated with more than 50 types of cancer.

More consumers are getting preventive testing and tracking their biomarkers. But an onslaught of data can lead to overwhelm when the data doesn't translate into clinically relevant next steps. How are you grappling with this? 

People need somewhere to go with what they learn. When you are worried at eleven o'clock at night, you need an anchor, and that is the role of the clinician, the nurse, the caregiver. Continuous data makes that relationship more useful because it gives both people something specific to work on.

A number by itself does not help much if you do not know what to do with it. What matters is understanding what it means and what your next step should be.

With Advanced Labs, every report is reviewed by a licensed clinician who helps explain what matters, what to watch over time, and when it may make sense to follow up with a doctor.

Many people who run a panel find something meaningful that could benefit from follow-up with a clinician. Those follow-ups are the outcome we are building for. The goal is not more data. It is better decisions.

Access without interpretation can create confusion or unnecessary anxiety. Building that interpretation layer well, keeping licensed clinicians in the loop, and being precise about what a result does and does not tell you is harder than simply adding more tests. It is also the whole job.

Is there a gold standard number of biomarkers that can lead to optimal aging?

We have a habit in medicine of setting the gold standard so high that most people never reach it. The better standard is the one that gets a meaningful result to a real person early enough to matter.

What actually predicts how well you age is well established: cardiovascular health, metabolic health, inflammation and, in many cases, hormones. That is why our panels are built around those systems rather than around a headline number of biomarkers.

Two things matter more than the number. The first is trajectory. A single lipid panel at 45 tells me far less than seeing those same measures at 32, 38 and 45. I can only manage what I measure, and I cannot manage something I measure once a year.

The second is what sits next to the blood work. A biomarker read alongside how someone sleeps, recovers and moves every day tells you more than that same value sitting by itself.

What are you most eager to accomplish in this new role? What challenges are you preparing for?

What I want most is to close the distance between measurement and medicine. We have spent a decade getting very good at capturing physiology continuously, and we are still early in turning that into decisions people and their doctors can act on.

Opening Advanced Labs to people without a WHOOP membership is a step in that direction, because a comprehensive panel starting near $150 reaches people for whom the same workup through traditional channels can cost much more. Prevention that only reaches the people who could already afford it is not population health.

The other challenge is my own field. More patients are arriving with their own health data, and clinicians are increasingly being asked to help put that information in context. That is not consumerism; it is patient agency, and I think it can be a very productive place for a clinical conversation to start.

What else are we not talking enough about?

We tend to call the moment a patient leaves the hospital the last mile of healthcare. I would like us to call it the first mile and mean it. Care starts with the person at home, in their own community, on an ordinary Tuesday.

That matters for longevity because many of the biggest risks to long-term health can be identified well before disease arrives. Cardiometabolic risk can be detected years ahead of an event, and so can many of the factors that quietly shorten healthspan. The barriers have often been delivery and cost, and both are solvable.

The last thing I would add is about who this reaches. Women often play an important role in healthcare decisions for themselves and their families, and when women engage with their own health, that impact can extend beyond the individual. Yet many areas of testing and prevention have historically not been designed or delivered around women’s needs. I am excited for us to help change that.