When she launched a company based on a disruptive technology, Elizabeth Holmes didn’t give much thought to the challenges she would face going against the grain of the health care industry.
“When you find what you feel like you were born to do, you go do it,” says Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, a Silicon Valley lab-testing company that uses a finger-prick blood draw instead of an intravenous one.
Holmes was so passionate about her calling that she dropped out of Stanford University in the middle of her sophomore year — at age 19 — founded Theranos, a private company that employs more than 500 and is valued by investors at $9 billion. Holmes is reported to own half of the company’s shares.
“There was not a lot of involved thinking that went into dropping out and starting Theranos because it was what I wanted to do with my life,” she says.
Holmes was one of the keynote speakers at the recent Cleveland Clinic 2015 Medical Innovation Summit and was interviewed by Dr. Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, CEO and president of the Clinic, in a fireside chat format.
“I’ve had this incredible blessing — I really believe that the work we are doing is the way to make the greatest difference in the world,” Holmes says. “There is nothing that I would rather be doing every day.”
Belief in the mission
While her company is disrupting the existing blood-testing market with its established leaders and partnerships, Holmes says she is able to weather the controversy and criticism because she believes in her mission.
“Our work is about the belief that access to actionable health information is a basic human right,” she says. “We have spent the last 12 years working really hard to be able to make laboratory information more accessible to people. Laboratory data drives a huge percentage of clinical decisions.
“We believe it’s wrong for people to pay $10,000 for a lab test,” Holmes says. “When you find out that you are sick or that someone you love is sick, it’s often too late in the disease-prevention process to be able to change outcomes. We are ready to be beaten up as many times as it takes because we are going to be the change in the world.”
The company’s technology has come under fire. The Wall Street Journal recently called into question the accuracy of some of its tests. Holmes said the reports were inaccurate, and Theranos posted a rebuttal on its website. The company suspended some testing while it produced data to answer its critics.
Investment a given
While such a position of compassion may be difficult to argue against, it takes a sincere commitment to support the mission.
“That means investing in technology that can begin to change how testing has been done historically,” Holmes says. “So our work is about the individual and the belief that if we can engage the individual and the consumer in health care, we have a tremendous opportunity to realize a change in outcomes.”
Patients face the unfortunate reality that they can only get laboratory tests done at an affordable cost if they have already been diagnosed as having a disease. If they don’t have a disease, insurance companies usually reject the claim, and people have to pay out of pocket for the testing, which can be expensive.
“What we’ve seen is that a huge percentage of people, even with insurance, don’t get the tests they need because they have deductibles, which are too high to be able to pay for,” Homes says. “The more you can shift that, the more you can get individuals engaged with their own health, the more you can change outcomes, and you can begin to change the system into one where early detection becomes a reality.”
On the early detection side, Holmes is most interested in diabetes and the issue with undiagnosed prediabetes. She offers statistics that there are now 90 million undiagnosed prediabetics in the country, and some 20 percent of health care expenses are spent on Type 2 diabetes care.
Yet there are simple tests, Holmes says, that can be accessible to people to determine if they are prediabetic.
“This is a disease that so many doctors have demonstrated can be reversed with changes in life style and diet, yet I think about people in my own family who didn’t even know they were at risk and therefore weren’t paying attention.”
How to reach: Theranos, (650) 838-9292 or www.theranos.com
