http://www.wired.com/2014/02/elizabeth-holmes-theranos/
Part I: Accelerate:
What are you doing to ensure the accuracy of your testing?
The key is minimizing the variability that traditionally contributes to error in the lab process. Ninety-three percent of error is associated with what’s called pre-analytic processing — generally the part of the process where humans do things.
Such as?
Manually centrifuging a sample or how much time elapses before you test the sample, which brings its decay rate into play.
So how do you avoid these potential errors?
There’s no manual handling of the sample, no one is trying to pipette into a Nanotainer, no one is manually processing it. The blood is collected and put into a box that keeps it cold. The very next thing that happens is lab processing, and that’s done with automated devices at our centralized facility with no manual intervention or operation.
Part II: the neoliberal / biopower nexus
Will people become more used to gathering and examining their own health data?
No one thinks of the lab-testing experience as positive. It should be! One way to create that is to help people engage with the data once their physicians release it. You can’t do that if you don’t really understand why you’re getting certain tests done and when you don’t know what the results mean when you get them back.
It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn’t tell you what’s going on at a biochemical level. What’s really exciting is when you can begin to see changes in your lifestyle appear in your blood data. With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early they can take steps to avert getting sick. By testing, you can start to understand your body, understand yourself, change your diet, change your lifestyle, and begin to change your life.
I am not "complaining" about this; I am pointing out the individualism of it, the inducement to become a healthy subject, and the concomitant lack of attention to the socio-political-economic structures that lead to the population-level phenomenon of Type-2 diabetes, for instance. That's the neoliberal / biopower nexus: you take a population level phenomenon and render it tractable at the individual level.
My complaint is more with the "interviewer" for lobbing such softball questions. This is basically a press release rather than an interview. Especially since the interviewee brought up the health care system, some questions about the *system* would have helped instead of the gee-whiz technophilia on display. Of course, "forget it, Jake, it's Wired" is another way to say all that.
So, on the whole, "not that there's anything wrong with that," but, also, "nothing is bad, everything is dangerous."