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Affordable Blood Work In Four Hours Coming To Pharmacies
kkleiner writes "With the cost of healthcare services increasing, it's welcome news that a recent deal between Walgreens and Theranos will bring rapid, accurate, low-cost blood testing to the local pharmacy. A pinprick of blood from a finger is enough to run any number of a la carte diagnostic tests with results in four hours or less. The automation of blood testing in one convenient machine may mean that the demand for clinical technicians may decline, but the benefits of making blood analysis more accessible to everyone is enormous."
that the winner of the international science fair came up with...detected Lung, Pancreatic and one other type of cancer using a carbon nanotube and a handful of parts he picked up at Home Depot. Cost of the test? About $0.04 and highly accurate.
What will it cost after it's commercialized? We'll see.
I'm not sure where this breathless PR piece is leading to. We've been using 'micro' samples in automatic lab analyzers for years. Just because you can get the results from Walgreen's doesn't change things.
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody. Tests where the FDA has approved patient education for point of care testing. I don't think you can order a whole lot more without 'practicing medicine' and for that you need some sort of license. Perhaps they will limit the testing to places where they have a mini clinic with a PA (physician's assistant) or NP (nurse practitioner).
Ordering tests without knowledge of some important things (like pretest probability / accuracy and sensitivity of the tests) is basically worthless.
But what the hell, it will make somebody some money. That's what counts.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not really. I've got this hang up about actually wanting to be a part of raising the children I'll (hopefully) one day father.
Besides, sperm donation doesn't exactly save lives, whereas blood donation does. Last Wednesday marked my 20th donation (2.5 gallons) and the second year in a row I managed to make six donations in a calendar year, the maximum allowed in the United States and Canada. Earlier in the year I even got a letter from the ARC saying that one of my donations had been transfused into two different patients somewhere out in Buffalo.
Do you know of a way to make that kind of a positive impact for less than an hour of your time?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Blood from the tip of your penis is actually the best blood to use for tests. If you complain about it you're just a problem patient.
Uh, they have a licensed pharmacist right there to analyze the results, in the rest of the world a pharmacist can basically do everything an NP can do because they have to know medicine and pharmacology to do their job.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I imagine that Walgreens is going to run only a few tests - cholesterol, pregnancy, HIV antibody.
Well, it looks like a few more than that:
http://www.theranos.com/test-menu?ref=our_solution
I didn't bother to count; maybe 200 in that list? Heavily tilted towards drug detection and STDs, but still a pretty good variety.
Why would I make an appointment with my doctor for 4 weeks from now, drive over, get a referral to a testing center, drive over, get stuck and drained, drive home, make another appointment for 4 weeks to get the results, drive over, and have someone read me results with no background info, when I could go to Walgreens, walk out with the results 10 minutes later, and spend 20 minutes on Google finding out what they really mean?
I would say that the fact that I can get results from Walgreens changes everything.
And the worms ate into his brain.
This is the main reason this is good. Just like giving flu shots at the pharmacy. Technology has advanced so much, at yet, in the medical field, prices have only skyrocketed, because there's strict limits on who can do what. If diabetics can give themselves their own insulin injections, there's no reason the average Joe shouldn't be able to give themselves a flu shot, or at least get one from somebody who doesn't cost as much to employ as a nurse. Same goes for simple blood tests. For many blood tests, there's very little reason to go to a specialized lab, so they can charge extravagant amounts of money for putting a drop of blood on a piece of paper and looking at what color it turns. We need to bring the cost of healthcare down, especially for routine procedures if we want people to be able to afford medical care in the future.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Indeed. It's really a failure of the system that I can't go to "Bob's discount MRI and Bait Shop" for the "cheaper at 4AM" discount. There are only so many MRI machines in the world, so MRIs are far too expensive. Why aren't there more? Why are any of them idle at 4AM? A system that doesn't respond well to demand by increasing supply has issues.
And you see this all over healthcare. Sure, it takes a doctor to understand what test results mean in the context of patient care. But the tests themselves are just technology, and nothing brings cost down like the march of technological progress. Something's fundamentally broken when we're not seeing the cost of high-tech tests fall quickly over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nope. Insurance companies have an interest in increasing medical costs.
Under Obamacare health insurance companies are allowed a maximum of 20% of the cost of medical care. The only way health insurance companies can increase their profits is by increasing medical care costs.
Man, I hope you aren't anywhere near the legislative process. People like you are why we can't have nice things.
I have ten times more motivation and available time to research than my doctor does; he's just trying to last through his 80 patients a day and not kill anyone. His training and experience are certainly valuable, but for the most part when I'm talking to a doctor s/he's either (a) a generalist with a little bit of familiarity with me and a little bit of familiarity with what might be wrong with me, or (b) a specialist that knows a great deal about one particular thing that *might* be wrong with me but knows exactly dick about me personally.
I, on the other hand, have excellent computer skills and search fu, can read, understand and critique research in some disciplines (a skill that is highly transferable, by the way), and know a great deal about myself. I'd *much* rather be able to manage my own treatment and consult with a doctor when I need insight or specialized skills.
cogito ergo dubito
The last time I took a blood test to my GP (ordered by my dermatologist) she said "Hmm, I don't normally order that test.
That's why your dermatologist should have been interpreting the results and discussing them with you. Specialists may often order tests that general practitioners don't.
A previous poster who asked why he should get an appointment and drive around and then have someone read him results over the phone demonstrated a more serious problem than just having to visit a doctor. He's got a doctor that doesn't care and doesn't explain what the results mean. Or doesn't have time to care. As more people go to the same number of doctors because they've now got insurance, that problem will get worse and not better.
I've seen this problem firsthand. My previous GP was my GP in name only; I got handled by his PA, and after one test I learned of the diagnosis from the medical equipment salesman calling to set up a time to deliver the equipment I was supposed to use instead of from the PA or GP. My current GP is much different.
So, yes, I do have the knowledge to do that.
Some people do. The vast majority do not. The vast majority will see low value on a test result and find the absolute worst possible interpretation on the web, ignoring the more common less serious possibilities. Kind of like, "OMG, I've got red spots all over my face, I must have measles", instead of thinking "I drank myself into a stupor and my frat buddies had a good time with a red sharpie." Like "OMG, my vitamin D numbers are low, I must have ..." instead of "eat more veggies with vitamin D and get more sun, or take a vitamin pill".
Based on my recent experience with an illness, this is exactly what you will have to do if you ever fall out of the normal bounds of straightforward illnesses. You will be managing your own treatment and trying to piece together what's wrong with you. You will burn through doctors and specialists one by one as they say they cannot help and refuse to let you make appointments. You will end up being the only person on the whole planet who cares and all the time you will be doing this when you are sick and/or drugged up. You will also realize that the whole health care system does not work like JIRA and that there is no follow up and your issue will be dropped if you don't continue to be the squeaky wheel. Health care is not engineering. It's scary how few engineering best practices are used in it and how full of holes the "system" has. Healthcare is probably about 40 years behind engineering in terms of problems solving and issue resolution and about a million years behind understanding how our bodies work vs "complex" systems we diddle around with all day on computers.
Moral of the story is - don't get sick with anything weird otherwise you're basically toast.