You can order your own bloodwork now. Interpreting the results is another story

Health You can order your own bloodwork now. Interpreting the results is another story April 14, 202610:58 AM ET By  Kate Cunningham ismagilov/iStockphoto/Getty Images Lana McDonald, a 34-year-old teacher from Massachusetts, got an Oura Ring two years ago to track her sleep. When she got an email from Oura selling a set of blood tests for $99, she was intrigued. Her primary care physician had never ordered blood testing before. The app took her to the website for Quest Diagnostics, where she got an appointment within the week. The results started coming in that same day. Direct-to-consumer blood testing is a growing industry targeting health-conscious patients who want to order their own blood work for the price of a dinner out. Sponsor Message The space is becoming increasingly crowded: both by direct offerings from commercial laboratories such as Quest and Labcorp OnDemand, and by companies that partner with them to offer the testing. Recent blood testing rollouts came from Oura, which has sold some 5.5 million of its smart rings and is aiming at that customer base, and from the wearable company Whoop. It's Been a Minute Is tech making us too obsessed with our bodies? The telehealth platform Hims & Hers, with 2.5 million members, also released a product in late 2025. Meanwhile, the health care technology company Function Health, which offers testing to its hundreds of thousands of members, received a $2.5 billion valuation after a recent funding round. This growing trend disrupts a long-standing paradigm in which your doctor tells you when you need a test, calls you with the results and offers a treatment plan. Instead, consumers like McDonald are taking the initiative to order tests and are left to interpret the results on their own. Lana McDonald was surprised by a few of the results she found on her blood tests from Oura. She turned to her own doctor to help make sense of them. Lana McDonald hide caption toggle caption Lana McDonald "There's this idea that...