YC Startup Healthy Labs Wants To Be The Go-To Site For People Living With Chronic Illness | TechCrunch

When it comes to advice and support for people who are diagnosed with chronic medical conditions, things aren’t so easy. The main places where people share tips, treatment experiences, and support are relegated to the kinds of answers websites and web forums that seem stuck in the 1990s and early aughts.

Healthy Labs, a new startup incubated in the current batch of Y Combinator startups, wants to fill that gap and be the go-to place for people living with chronic medical conditions. Co-founded by Sean Ahrens and Will Cole, who met while they were each studying computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, Healthy Labs has made its initial debut this month with the beta release ofCrohnology — essentially, a social network for people dealing with Crohn’s Disease and Colitis.

It is a niche play, but it’s a big one: Crohn’s and Colitis themselves afflict 1.5 million people in the United States alone, and some 5 million people worldwide. And the nature of these kinds of issues is that their effects are very personal, as are responses to treatment — what works for one person may not work for another. So traditional medicine has not come up “cures” for these afflictions. But there is a big element of collective sharing, comparing, and contrasting that can occur especially well online that can help individuals discover what treatment and maintenance regimens may work for them.