by aresant on 5/19/16, 1:40 AM
"One family practitioner in a suburb of Phoenix said a Theranos representative dropped off a stack of 20 corrected test reports a few weeks ago. Many of the voided results were for calcium, estrogen and testosterone tests.
The doctor said one corrected report is for a patient she sent to the emergency room after receiving abnormally elevated test results from Theranos in late 2014."
Tort attorneys should be licking their lips.
It would be shocking if Theranos survives this.
Beyond that Walgreens - the largest retail pharmacy chain in the USA and Theranos' wellness center partner - should also be in the crosshairs.
Feels like they should have had some better safeguards for consumers before committing to the 40-store pilot in AZ.
by lquist on 5/19/16, 6:16 AM
I'm based in SV, and I see a lot of big name entrepreneurs rallying behind her and I don't understand it. You cannot be cavalier/lean about human life. These people deserve to be jailed.
by a_small_island on 5/19/16, 1:22 AM
>That means some patients received erroneous results that might have thrown off health decisions made with their doctors.
Put them in jail.
by apo on 5/19/16, 1:52 AM
This is what happens when you try a Minimum Viable Product in healthcare and aren't up-front about slower than expected R&D progress.
by _Codemonkeyism on 5/19/16, 4:36 AM
Interesting they couldn't even user other peoples machines
"A person familiar with the matter said the Arizona lab performed the blood-coagulation tests with a traditional machine from Siemens AG that was programmed to the wrong settings by Theranos.
The Arizona lab also failed several tests to gauge the purity of the water it uses in its Siemens machines, which could affect the accuracy of some blood tests run on the devices, the person said."
by taneem on 5/19/16, 1:19 AM
This is likely the beginning of the end. With such a massive loss of trust, especially in the healthcare space, it is hard to see how the company could ever recover in the eyes of customers, investors or employees.
by rcarrigan87 on 5/19/16, 1:49 AM
Can someone put this into perspective...how often are there major recalls or calibration issues at other, more established labs and testing companies?
Certainly, not trying to defend Theranos, just trying to understand how bad this really is. Because it sounds pretty horrible...
by dvcrn on 5/19/16, 1:32 AM
by bane on 5/19/16, 12:39 PM
by tn13 on 5/19/16, 6:32 AM
Can someone please summarize what this actually means? The article is behind paywall and the title is cryptic.
What does "void" mean ? Less accurate, completely wrong, completely random ? What does Two years refer to ?
by jbuzbee on 5/19/16, 1:36 AM
The class-action lawyers must be salivating over "tens of thousands of corrected blood-test reports"
by josh_carterPDX on 5/19/16, 4:04 AM
This is not what disruption looks like. This is what happens when you have someone with no domain expertise, but a great idea. We're seeing the same thing happening with Zenefits. Founders with no domain experience need to look at how they're going to enter a market full of incumbents. These incumbent businesses have survived for years because they know how to play the game. They have people in their employ that know how to lobby the right regulatory bodies. Theranos had none of this. So when all of this started coming down, they should have hired the most well-known and respected person in their field to bridge the gap between the past and future. Without that, they are outsiders playing in a game that has been around forever. They were set up for failure before they even began and no one was smart enough to ask "How will they disrupt an industry that has been around for decades?" Just saying, "We're going to make medical tests cheaper and more accessible" was clearly not the right answer.
by hathym on 5/19/16, 6:19 AM
if you came here without reading the article, all you need to know is that Theranos is fucked.
by radnam on 5/19/16, 5:29 AM
I was extremely optimistic for Theranos and having to see them go through this is sad on so many levels. Not calibrating standard testing machinery correctly just does not cut it.
One of their notable contributions is to set precedence in Arizona where consumers can now order their own tests without doctor's orders.
I believe consumer awareness of state-of-art diagnostic resting and making testing readily accessible can have a fundamental impact on people's wellness.
ps: I am not advocating more testing.
by return0 on 5/19/16, 8:10 AM
The reporting by Carreyrou is particularly insistent to put Holmes front-center in each of this series of articles. She's in the article subtitle and first image again. I wonder if other execs are also responsible for this disaster.
by foobar1962 on 5/19/16, 9:42 AM
So when is the Edison estate going to issue a cease order against Theranos for using their name and damaging the reputation?
by oneloop on 5/19/16, 8:48 AM
"Theranos has declined to quantify to Walgreens the scale of its test corrections"
Doesn't seem like they're learning anything.
by vonklaus on 5/19/16, 1:50 AM
I still believe in the idea of Theranos and while I think it is great the Ev Williams was able to secure funding 2 more times to keep rebuilding different versions of blogger[0], I want to live in a world where we also take huge gambles on hard problems. If we adhere to VC math (we should as this hypothetical is for VC investing) one of these payouts will be well worth it, e.g. Tesla/SpaceX. So yeah, I'd write down uBeam & Theranos, but you can fuck off if you want the world to stop investing in big ideas.
[0]twitter.com, medium.com
edit: Also, we can assume it isn't physically impossible to use smaller amounts of blood to perform tests. So yeah, it was super obvious from the beginning some immigrant who happened to be in the right place at the right time and make some money at the height of the DOTCOM era working in software couldn't build a sustainable rocket program that rivals that of 1st world nations. So it wasn't obvious, and the next big innovation won't be obvious, and if you think it is you are either building it or just straight up wrong.