Entrepreneurs: Disrupting Healthcare
by Miki SaxonIf any consumer industry is ripe for disruption it’s healthcare—not just its recordkeeping.
Yet it would be hard to find any industry in which the established players are more resistant or just plain obstructive.
But thanks to people such as Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, and Dr. Isaac Yonemoto, founder of open-source IndySci, real disruption is happening.
Eleven years ago at 19 Holmes decided that she would spend her Stanford tuition on changing the healthcare status quo, which she did by upending one of the oldest, most expensive, completely ubiquitous, and least changed diagnostic tools—blood testing.
The new tests can be done without going to the doctor, which saves both money and time. Most results are available in about four hours, which means that you could swing by a pharmacy and have a test done the day before a doctor’s visit, and then the results would be available for the physician.
Each test costs less than 50% of standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. If those two programs were to perform all tests at those prices, they’d save $202 billion over the next decade.
As an example of how helpful that can be, Holmes told Wired that Theranos charges $35 for a fertility test, which is usually paid for out-of-pocket and costs up to $2,000.
Those who aren’t partial to needles and vials of blood (most of us) should note that the Theranos test requires only one drop of blood from a prick of the finger.
Last year the company cut a deal with Walgreens to roll out Theranos Wellness Centers inside each of its 8000-plus pharmacies.
Dr. Isaac Yonemoto is used crowdfunding (campaign ended October 28) to finance Project Marilyn to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs.
The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. (…) “The big picture is we’ll be trying to solve the problem of expensive pharmaceuticals by releasing drug candidates that put downward pressure on price through competition.”
Elizabeth Holmes’ one-drop blood test is the start of true disruption and if Dr. Isaac Yonemoto’s Project Marilyn is even half as successful as Linus Torvalds’ Linux they will change the face of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry forever.
