Neko Health promises a new era of preventive healthcare, but questions remain over efficacy and accessibility. Photo by Petr Magera on Unsplash.
Preventive healthcare…emphasises early detection, risk assessment, and consideration of lifestyle factors.
As the rate of noncommunicable and chronic diseases continues to increase in the United Kingdom, there has been an increased focus on preventive healthcare. This shift is reflected both in public health discourse and political priorities, with MPs and policymakers arguing that prevention is central to the NHS’s future sustainability. Preventive healthcare is a shift from the current model of care, which is reactive and focused primarily on acute illnesses, to one that emphasises early detection, risk assessment, and consideration of lifestyle factors. The most obvious benefit is that addressing the early presentations and origins of noncommunicable diseases enables people to live longer, more fulfilling lives. The economic argument is also compelling: healthy people can contribute more effectively to the economy, and preventive healthcare reduces the need for costly late-stage treatment and hospital stays. But what should prevention look like in practice? Enter Neko Health: the Instagram-famous, celebrity-favourite, waitlist-only, £299 preventive scan promising early disease detection and control over your health. Could this be the future of prevention?
Neko Health: the Instagram-famous, celebrity-favourite, waitlist-only, £299 preventive scan promising early disease detection and control over your health
About Neko Health
Founded in 2018 by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, Neko Health launched its first clinic in Stockholm before expanding to London in September 2024. Neko currently has locations in London, Manchester, and Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and the first location in the United States is set to launch in the spring of 2026. Neko Health promises comprehensive, non-invasive, and data-driven preventive healthcare. Their body scan uses over 70 sensors to collect approximately 50 million data points from your body, checking for cardiovascular factors, metabolic markers, skin abnormalities, and general blood abnormalities. The test takes only an hour, and results are available immediately afterwards. All results are discussed with the in-house physician and are available for continued reference through a phone app.
In line with broader trends in digital health, Neko Health has capitalised on artificial intelligence to process and analyse large volumes of biometric data. The immediacy of the scan and its results is only possible due to this engagement with complex algorithms and artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence model can assist doctors in flagging abnormalities, identifying patterns, and detecting problems that traditional clinical models may miss. AI models are known to exhibit algorithmic bias, where systems perform worse for certain groups, such as struggling to detect skin cancer in darker skin tones, a concern that is particularly relevant here, given that one of Neko’s primary uses is detecting suspicious dermal growths.
While similar health-scanning companies like Prenuvo use whole-body MRI technology, which can cost upwards of £2,499 per session, Neko’s scan is incredibly quick, non-MRI-based, and priced at a relatively more accessible rate. The experience of getting a Neko Health scan has been likened more to a spa experience than to a clinical one, unlike many reports of MRI-based testing. As younger patients are increasingly anxious about hospitals and clinical settings, this aesthetic difference is important. In Neko’s own words: ‘Detect. Prevent. Relax.’
Measuring Efficacy
To evaluate whether Neko Health delivers on its ambitious promise, its clinical efficacy must be considered. In 2024, Neko Health released an annual report covering 4362 scans conducted at its Stockholm clinic. This report provides the clearest and most up-to-date picture of what the service actually offers. Of those scanned, 81.3% were found to be in good health and required no medical follow-up. The remaining 18.7% ranged considerably in type and severity. Of the most severe, 1.2% were found to have a previously unknown life-threatening condition requiring immediate medical attention, including malignant melanoma, severe cardiovascular disease, leukaemia, and serious metabolic disorders. A further 4% were diagnosed with significant, but less acute conditions, including hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and non-melanoma skin cancers. A final 1.2% presented with reversible or early-stage markers, including slightly elevated blood pressure and pre-diabetes. Taken together, just over 6% of patients scanned received findings deemed clinically meaningful and actionable. These numbers could represent lives saved—they are not insignificant.
That said, in the same report, Neko acknowledged that these numbers are not part of a scientifically controlled study and that the data come from their own records. The numbers are not peer-reviewed, and there is a clear conflict of interest. The self-selected nature of the cohort, people who have both the means and motivation to seek out a £299 preventive scan, limits the applicability and generalisability of these findings to a larger population.
Accessibility
One of the most significant concerns about Neko Health is accessibility. The £299 entry price may strike some as reasonable compared to comparable services; it is, after all, a fraction of what Prenuvo charges. But this figure is somewhat misleading. According to Neko Health, annual scans are recommended. In fact, if you book another scan, the price of the following scan decreases from £299 to £249. For a household already stretched by the cost of living, a recurring annual commitment of £250–£300 per person is significant.
…preventive healthcare has traditionally been framed as a population-level public good. When it becomes an individualised, privately purchased commodity, access becomes uneven.
If we consider the broader implications, the emergence of a stratified healthcare system in the United Kingdom is an important concern. It has been argued that the United Kingdom already operates under a two-tiered system of treatment, with many wealthy patients choosing to go private to circumvent long NHS waitlists and bureaucracy. Services like Neko Health risk extending this divide to encompass prevention. This is significant because preventive healthcare has traditionally been framed as a population-level public good. When it becomes an individualised, privately purchased commodity, access becomes uneven. This is seen in the Inverse Care Law, in which good healthcare is most accessible to those who often need it least, while those with the greatest need lack access.
It is also worth considering that Neko currently operates under an exclusive waitlist-only model, where potential patients may wait for months just to have the option to book an appointment in the future. The only way to bypass this is through an elusive invite code from a current user, keeping the platform’s circle deliberately exclusive and further limiting accessibility by excluding even those who can afford and desire to use this service.
Over-Pathologising
A second concern relates to the psychological dynamics of broad-spectrum screening and the risk of over-pathologising what is clinically unexciting. At-home screening tests and technologies (food sensitivity tests, at-home hormone tests, etc) have become incredibly popular since the COVID-19 pandemic, at least partly in response to the well-documented difficulty of accessing timely GP care. While some have argued that these technologies and tests may give patients more agency in their care, many are sceptical of the helpfulness of these tests, arguing they feed into cultures of health anxiety rather than improving access. This can lead to increased patient anxiety and worry in otherwise asymptomatic and generally healthy individuals. Incidental findings discovered through at-home or direct-to-consumer testing are often of negligible clinical significance. This concern is particularly salient for a product like Neko Health, which processes millions of data points and generates extremely comprehensive reports for patients who, in many cases, are generally well. While a doctor-led consultation following each Neko scan is intended to contextualise the results, the risk remains that people who are broadly healthy leave with new, not necessarily actionable, anxieties about their bodies and potential risks from follow-up procedures (biopsies and scans) that also can cause harm. Furthermore, with such a large volume of data provided to the patient, interpretation can still fall onto patients, reinforcing health anxiety.
On a systems level, this concern matters for the NHS. If a proportion of Neko customers seek follow-up consultations with their NHS GPs to further contextualise results or conduct follow-up testing, this will have a negative downstream effect on NHS primary care. Some health experts have already raised concerns that this may exacerbate the already dire NHS demand crisis. Whether this is speculative or a lived consequence at its current scale remains to be seen, but it is worth considering as Neko and companies like it expand.
Neko Health is a compelling product, and it may even save lives. But it is not, in its current form, the future of preventive healthcare.
Neko Health is, in many ways, a genuinely impressive and innovative product that seductively promises people control over their healthcare, and champions a preventive approach that so many have long desired. For individuals with the means to afford the product and travel regularly to testing centres, it may represent a meaningful addition to a preventive health strategy. But it also may more realistically cause more anxiety and pose a risk from unnecessary follow-ups. The question I opened with, whether Neko Health is the future of preventive healthcare, demands a more critical answer. Without public subsidies, NHS and private insurance integration, or more fundamental changes to primary healthcare infrastructure, Neko Health presents an image of an unevenly distributed future of preventive health. A future that belongs to the healthy, affluent, and already health-literate. Neko Health is a compelling product, and it may even save lives. But it is not, in its current form, the future of preventive healthcare. While it perhaps may provide a glimpse of such a future, it also serves as a reminder of how far we still have to go.
