Early Detection within 5 Miles of Home!
Imagine walking into your neighborhood pharmacy and having your body’s calcium, cholesterol, and sodium levels tested by a lab technician on the spot. Then imagine receiving a total medical bill of $9.85, covered by your insurance, with tests results in a matter of hours. Sounds like science fiction, but it’s already happening at select Walgreen’s stores. The Theranos Wellness Center is an innovative new CLIA-certified lab, partnered with Walgreen’s, and offering nearly 200 lab tests with no hospitals, no waiting rooms, and no needles!
Blood tests without needles
With just a few drops of your blood from a painless finger prick, Theranos Wellness Center phlebotomists will give you high complexity lab results in hours. The Theranos laboratory requires samples as minute as 1/1000 of a typical blood draw, and their finger stick is effectively able to draw blood from children as young as two years old.
Early Detection
By making lab testing fast and affordable, Theranos allows for patients to monitor their own bodies, and their children’s bodies, in order to maintain homeostasis and detect problems before they arise. Accepting Medicare, Medicaid, and all major insurance providers allows the Wellness Center to open up a whole new world of early medical detection! Physicians can now access patient test information weeks faster than a standard laboratory! Through an office network service, patients, physicians, and Theranos Wellness Centers can stay connected and share important patient information instantaneously.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes told Medscape.com, “We can, on a given sample, automatically run to other assay methodologies that traditionally would require a separate draw… For example, in the morning a patient could come to a wellness center and we could draw a sample. The physician could say on their requisition that if this is out of range, automatically run this other test. And that afternoon, when the physician sees the patient, they have all of that information.”
Smartphone Applications
Integrating this technology into a smartphone app would allow patients to routinely monitor their hormone, hemoglobin, vitamin and mineral levels, and take preventative measures against illnesses, while smartphone tech support assist them in using the applications.
As Holmes told Medscape, “I think integration with a smartphone is a huge area of opportunity…As we look at ways in which this could evolve in the future, the goal is faster and faster diagnosis, smaller and smaller samples, and more predictive testing…for early detection.”
The Wall Street Journal says diagnostic tests account for between 2% and 2.5% of health spending, but Holmes noted to the WSJ that ‘an estimated seven or eight out of 10 clinical decisions by physicians’ is driven by test results, with ‘6.8 billion lab tests annually in the U.S.’
Theranos Wellness Centers also test urine, stool, and other body fluids, offering tests as varied as Erythropropoietin, Respiratory Virus, Thyroid uptake, STD testing, and numerous immunoglobulin diagnostics.
With Walgreen’s 8,100 nationwide stores, and Theranos rolling out a full spectrum of 800 other tests to enhance their lab capabilities, this partnership will drastically alter the medical landscape in the customer’s favor.
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Filed under: medical technology, startups