Reading the instruments
This journal reads health software the way you would read a chart: slowly, one claim at a time, with the source open beside it. Three essays so far, each on one property of labs.llc, each built from figures we fetched ourselves and timestamped, and each naming at least one thing the property gets wrong. We publish no scores and no stars. A number here either has a time next to it or it does not appear.
We also have a conflict of interest, and it is total: this site is published by the team that builds the software it reviews. That is stated on every page and explained on the disclosure page, and it is the reason every essay ends with the measurements rather than with an opinion. You should not take our word for any of this. You should take our timestamps and check them.
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·1,800 words
On the Health Room
An index page has one job: describe eight instruments accurately. labs.llc’s health room does it well eight times and badly once — and the badly is a number that matters.
The shortcoming it publishes: the symptom-checker card says 148 conditions; the desk it points at counts 219. And the room’s closing band counts seven doors in a room of eight, in a paragraph borrowed from another room where the same sentence says ten.
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·1,600 words
On Hanta
An outbreak wire that counts honestly — six feeds, eighteen archive queries, 436 probe targets, every one of them exactly as advertised — and one band at the top of the page that does not.
The shortcoming it publishes: the “today’s snapshot” tiles are hand-typed HTML that no script ever touches, reporting “new cases, last 24h” beside a last reported case dated 12 May 2026.
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·1,800 words
On the Facilities Desk
A hospital search that relays a federal file at request time, leaves the government’s star ratings unaltered, and leaves them blank where the government left them blank.
The shortcoming it publishes: the page says “read live” and never mentions the hour of cache behind it; our first uncached query took 13.4 seconds, and three of every five Alaska hospitals came back with no rating at all.
Everything we review is software. Nothing here is medical advice, none of it diagnoses or treats anything, and where a tool displays a medical image we say plainly that it displays it and does not interpret it. Corrections, disputes and better numbers to labs@labs.llc — the only address this journal keeps.