Looking at the medical bill for my husband's last lipid (cholesterol) panel that totaled around $60, it's easy to see why the six seats at my local Phoenix, AZ Walgreens pharmacy are usually full of self-diagnosing patients waiting for "direct testing" by the Theranos Wellness Center within the store--especially considering the $9.21 that Theranos charges for that same lipid panel.
Theranos opened its first in-store Wellness Center in Palo Alto where the company is headquartered. In November 2013 it expanded outside California and opened its first two Wellness Centers in Phoenix, AZ. The Theranos "test menu" advertises more than 250 individual tests ranging from blood typing at $4 to cancer antigen 15-3 for a little more than $14 as well as a number of popular panels like lipids, metabolic, drug screens, and hepatitis ranging from $5 to $50. The company boasts that the tests cost 50% of what Medicare charges and more importantly, the tests are covered by Medicare and other major medical insurance plans.
In Arizona, House Bill 2645 now makes it legal for individuals to take any lab test offered at any of the 40 Theranos Wellness Centers without a doctor's prescription or order. In short, Theranos brings a whole new meaning to the term "point-of-care" medical testing as the tests are run at the site in as little as four hours rather than being sent out to a laboratory. Most online sources say that Theranos can run as many as 30 tests on one small drop of blood from a pin prick deposited in a small "nanotainer". Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes (pictured below; image credit: Wired) studied microfluidics and nanotechnology at Stanford before starting the company. Scanning the Internet for potential clues on how the tests are accomplished reveals that many news outlets experience the same frustration: Theranos is not divulging what technology it uses.
As Holmes says, Theranos enables individuals to take charge of their own destiny through self-diagnosis (hypochondriacs rejoice!). Seriously, we all know that early diagnosis improves a person's chances of surviving a major medical problem.
Even though the details of the Theranos technology still elude the public, I'd like to think that optics and photonics is enabling this point-of-care revolution from which we can all benefit (unless you are a well-paid laboratory technician that may soon need to seek employment at your neighborhood Walgreens).
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.