The basic problem with our healthcare system, according to Elizabeth Holmes, the billionaire founder of the blood testing company Theranos, is that we diagnose disease in the wrong way.
As she explains in a recent video on Makers, a web documentary site that tells the stories of women leaders, "If you look up the word 'diagnose' in the dictionary, it'll say 'to determine the presence of disease from its signs and symptoms.'"
But as Holmes has pointed out many times, once signs of disease are clearly visible, it's often too late to cure an illness, or at the very least outside the ideal window for effective treatment.
"At that point, these diseases have already progressed so far that oftentimes, no matter what therapy you put [someone] on, you're going to lose them," she explains. "If we could shift that paradigm to one in which you're determining the onset of the disease in time for therapy to be effective, then we will move to a system in which early detection and prevention become realities."
The biggest change that Theranos is advocating for isn't just a cheaper, faster, large needle-free blood test. It's the idea that people will use such tests to regularly keep tabs on their health and — in theory, for now — be able to recognize and prevent disease.
We should be keeping people healthy, Holmes argues, not just intervening once they're already clearly sick.
This idea that we can anticipate disease by monitoring our health more closely is one that many think will be essential in the future of medicine. Yet many doctors argue that we're not able to process and make practical use of all that data, and that —at least in the near-term future — it could lead to invasive and unnecessary treatment.
Still, as a forward looking innovation, it's been successful at capturing public interest so far.
Check out the Makers video, one of a series with Holmes that you can watch on their site:
