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Is having blood tests in grocery stores / pharmacies a newish thing in the US, or it existed for a long time? I lived in the US in 2004-2007, and had blood tests regularly, but it would have never occurred to me to go to a grocery store for one.
Is having blood tests in grocery stores / pharmacies a newish thing in the US, or it existed for a long time? I lived in the US in 2004-2007, and had blood tests regularly, but it would have never occurred to me to go to a grocery store for one.
Theranos's vision was to make blood tests easier and more accessible by requiring only a finger prick instead of drawing from a vein and by giving results quickly instead of hours or days later from a lab. It sounds like Safeway got on board with that vision as a forward-looking opportunity.
If a full panel blood test was as easy as a finger prick, then I could see blood testing going mainstream in the way that Theranos is hoping, and Safeway was hoping, but it all depends on the technology actually working as advertised.
> Theranos often drew the same employee’s blood twice, first with blood from a finger prick and then the traditional method of a needle in the arm, according to one former Safeway executive. > The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a tra…
"@Pete: it is entirely justified to have doubts about the validity of blood results obtained from finger pricks. The blood you get from a prick will be a mixture of blood from small venules, small arterioles, capillaries and lymph vessels, mixed with whatever loose tissue and cells have been cut by the prick and carried over into the blood. No way you could ever get a reliable CBC from such a sample. Since the kind of general blood tests that this company is targeting are usually CBC + chem panel, even if you could get your chem results from the prick, you still need a normal blood draw for the CBC, so the competitive advantage that they are trying to push (quick sampling by patient at pharmacy, without need for phlebotomist) is lost. On top of that, the variability inherent in chem results from prick blood will be significant for several analytes, like CK and AST (present in muscle so could be raised from prick injury), glucose and lipids (different levels in venous or arterial blood or lymph), etc… They are focusing on their fancy technology without much consideration of the underlying biology, typical error of engineering types.”
1. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/10/15/the...
> Theranos often drew the same employee’s blood twice, first with blood from a finger prick and then the traditional method of a needle in the arm, according to one former Safeway executive. > The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a tra…
Yep. I think this unicorn has a broken leg.
>The $350 million price tag was equivalent to more than half of Safeway’s net income of $596.5 million in 2012. Safeway had revenue of $44.21 billion. Safeway also invested more than $10 million in Theranos, one former Safeway executive said.
>Two of the former Safeway executives said they told Mr. Burd, Safeway’s chief executive, about the varying employee test results.
>The former executives said Mr. Burd told them he had been reassured by Ms. Holmes. Mr. Burd continued to support the partnership with Theranos, according to the former Safeway executives.
If he hadn't retired already, he should be fired for incompetence.
> Theranos often drew the same employee’s blood twice, first with blood from a finger prick and then the traditional method of a needle in the arm, according to one former Safeway executive. > The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a tra…
Yep. I think this unicorn has a broken leg.
Personally I view things where you give someone a false health diagnosis to be among the most egregious deceptions possible, a step beyond running a Ponzi scheme and in line with other things where users are severely hurt or killed.
> Theranos often drew the same employee’s blood twice, first with blood from a finger prick and then the traditional method of a needle in the arm, according to one former Safeway executive. > The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a tra…
Yep. I think this unicorn has a broken leg.
Personally I view things where you give someone a false health diagnosis to be among the most egregious deceptions possible, a step beyond running a Ponzi scheme and in line with other things where users are severely hurt or killed.