A Single Drop of Blood — In Search of Innovative Problems
Today, laboratory diagnostics — testing people’s blood — is a $76 Billion business. Phlebotomy, making incisions in a person’s vein to draw vials of blood for clinical or medical testing, is a 3,000 year old practice. In its modern form, it’s gone over 50 years without change. “It’s an industry that was just waiting to be disrupted, since blood testing has not changed since the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s,” says CNN Money.
In In Search of Innovative Problems, we said that a typical innovative problem might have many (e.g., 4–8) root causes or subproblems that can be recognized by encountering multiple Signposts of Innovation. Blood testing fits the bill: little or no change in decades or centuries (Signpost #1); millions of blood tests daily (#2); multiple vials of blood that need to be drawn on each visit and analyzed in large, expensive machines or shipped off to labs to conduct tests, taking days to get back results (#4); expensive (#5); and for very many, the fear of a needle being stuck into your arm while you have to watch (#9).
The disrupter in the blood testing business is Elizabeth Holmes, Stanford dropout who used her tuition money to launch Theranos. For ten years, she and her team reinvented the chemistry for every common blood test and found a way to reduce the amount of blood needed from several vials to a small pinprick. Up to 70 tests can be conducted on samples as small as a single drop of blood. While Theranos still needs labs to analyze blood, they have redesigned the analytic processes to speed up analysis, delivering results in hours after the blood draw instead of days. Their speed and efficiency allow them to offer blood tests at 50% of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Expect to see this revolution in your nearest Walgreens soon. Theranos has already opened store-based Wellness Centers in Walgreens in Phoenix and Palo Alto and has plans to roll out the concept to Walgreens stores around the country.
And all this from a single drop of blood!!
Read more about Theranos in articles in CNN Money and Business Insider.
This and all of our writings on Innovative Problems are compiled on our Medium page, Innovation Nation.
© Brian Leitten & Bradley Strock 2014
