Family profiles: kids' and parents' results in one app

HealthLab supports several family profiles inside a single install of the app: a child’s results, a spouse’s results, a parent’s results — each kept apart, each building its own set of trends, with nothing from one profile ever bleeding into another’s chart. This is a Free feature, available with no subscription and no cap on how many profiles you create. What follows is how to create a profile, switch between them, and make sure a newly saved result lands in the right one.

Profiles and the shared cabinet are two different features

The first thing worth untangling is that family profiles and the shared family medicine cabinet sound like they should be the same thing — both names mention “family” inside the same app — but they solve two entirely different problems. Family profiles split data apart within one installation of the app on one device: a child’s profile and a parent’s profile sit side by side, inside the same HealthLab, on the same iPhone. Nothing is being shared with anyone and nothing is being invited — it is simply a way of separating your own data from your kid’s on a single phone.

Family cabinet sharing is something else entirely: it moves the contents of the home medicine cabinet and the refill list between different iPhones belonging to different people, through private iCloud (Apple CloudKit Share). It has nothing to do with lab results, and it does not work with profiles at all — it works with a separate part of the app, the medicine cabinet, and it syncs that section between devices, not between profiles living on one device.

The confusion is understandable precisely because both features get described as “sharing with the family.” Profiles do not share anything with anyone — they only organize data that already lives on one phone. If the question on your mind is “how do I let my spouse see the cabinet on their own iPhone,” that is the shared cabinet article, not this one. If the question is “how do I keep my son’s results from getting mixed into mine,” this is exactly where you want to be.

What to do and where

Step 1. Create a new profile

Open “Profiles” — reachable from the profile-icon menu on the home screen, or from Settings — tap “Add profile,” then “Create profile,” and note who it belongs to: a child, a spouse, a parent. This is not an account and not an invitation: a profile is created instantly, locally, with no email and no password. How many profiles to set up is entirely up to you — a typical family creates one profile for everyone whose results it plans to track in the app.

Step 2. Switch between profiles

Open “Profiles” from the same profile-icon menu on the home screen, select the profile you want, and choose “Make active.” The active profile determines where new data lands and which set of trends you see on screen. Switching takes a couple of seconds and can be done at any time — it does not delete or alter data belonging to any profile, it simply presents the app from the point of view of whichever profile you just made active.

Step 3. Save an imported or manually entered result into the right profile

Whether you import a PDF, photograph a printed result, or type the values in by hand, the result gets saved into whichever profile happens to be active at that moment. It is worth a quick check before importing anything — especially right after you’ve been looking at a child’s data and are about to add a result of your own. One distracted moment is all it takes for an adult’s biomarker to land in a child’s profile, mixing two trends that have nothing to do with each other.

Step 4. Keep medication courses separate per profile

The same logic applies to medication courses with their schedules and reminders — they belong to a specific profile, the same as lab results do. A child’s fever syrup and a parent’s blood-pressure medication are two independent courses living in two different profiles, each with its own schedule and its own reminders that never cross over into the other.

Example: a child’s blood count and a parent’s thyroid panel

A seven-year-old gets a complete blood count twice a year — routine pediatric practice. One parent, 43 years old, gets a thyroid panel every six months. Both are recurring, both are the kind of result that is far more useful looked at over time than as a single isolated number.

Save both sets of results into the same profile, and the resulting chart turns into a collection of points that have nothing in common with each other: a seven-year-old’s blood count and a 43-year-old’s thyroid markers end up on the same timeline, but they don’t form any meaningful trend together — they’re just two unrelated stories mechanically forced onto one line. Split across two profiles, the same underlying data produces two simple, readable pictures instead: how the child’s blood count moves year over year, and how the parent’s thyroid panel holds up every six months. Which specific values sit inside or outside a healthy range is a question for a doctor — the app’s job here is only to make sure the right things are being compared against each other in the first place.

Edge cases

• A result got saved into the wrong profile. The simplest way to avoid this is to glance at which profile is active right before saving anything, particularly after switching between several profiles in quick succession.
• The other parent wants to see the same data on their own iPhone. That is not a profiles question at all — it is a question about moving data between devices, and profiles by themselves are local to one installation of the app. If the data in question is the medicine cabinet, see the shared family medicine cabinet; if it’s lab results and the profiles themselves showing up on another device under the same Apple ID, that falls under optional iCloud sync and moving to a new iPhone.
• One profile’s results come from a different lab than the rest. That doesn’t cause any problem for the profile itself: each profile simply accumulates whatever results get added to it, regardless of which lab issued them — the trend is built from the marker and the date, not from which lab ran the test.

Free or Pro

Multiple family profiles is entirely Free: creating profiles, switching between them, saving results into each one, and keeping separate medication courses per profile all work with no subscription and no cap on how many profiles exist. The paid feature sitting next to this is personalized norms, which adapt reference ranges to a person’s age, sex, and pregnancy status. Personalized norms only make sense in the first place because each profile keeps its own data apart — without that separation, there would be no single person’s data to adapt a norm to.

Frequently asked questions

HealthLab: one app, several health histories

Family profiles matter most once there’s more than one person in the household whose results are worth tracking regularly — for instance, when one of the women in the family is tracking pregnancy blood tests: a second profile tends to appear naturally at that point, since pregnancy results form their own distinct history that shouldn’t get mixed into the rest of the family’s data. The same logic applies to any recurring baseline check, like the kind covered in women’s health after 40: baseline labs — once that becomes a regular habit for one family member, keeping a dedicated profile for it just makes the resulting trend easier to read.

Profiles don’t replace the shared cabinet and don’t make it redundant — the two work independently, and using both at once is entirely normal: the cabinet stays shared at the device level, while lab results stay split at the profile level within each device.

To see what HealthLab does as a whole — lab results, medications, the cabinet — the landing page lays it out in full; profiles are described there as one of the app’s basic, free capabilities.