Empowered Patient Podcast Reimagining Blood Testing with Micro-Sampling and More Access for Collection with Eric Olson BetterWay by Babson Diagnostics
Eric Olson, COO and Founder of BetterWay™ by Babson Diagnostics™, reports that traditional blood testing is often seen as inconvenient and unpleasant, causing 40% of people to avoid needed blood tests. Babson has developed a more patient-friendly approach to blood collection using a device that fits on the finger and requires a minimum amount of blood. The BetterWay service allows patients or doctors to order tests where blood is drawn at a local pharmacy and samples analyzed at a central lab, providing a quick turnaround with understandable test results.
Eric explains, "Blood testing is something that most people are very familiar with. It’s a routine part of medical care. Every time you go in for your annual visit or if you’re monitoring a disease, maybe a chronic disease, you might get tested more frequently than once a year. The experience is something that a lot of people go through, which consists of having an appointment, going into some sort of patient service center, and getting blood drawn by a professional phlebotomist. They put a needle in your vein and use tubes to pull the blood out of the vein. They fill up multiple tubes of blood that get sent to a high-throughput laboratory that looks a bit like a factory for testing."
"If you go to BetterWay.com, you can see the full menu and the prices of all the tests on that menu, so there are no surprise bills. Insurance, FSA, and HSA are accepted. However, the cash pay prices are often lower than many people pay, even with insurance, due to copays and deductibles, which are very high for many people."
"So once you’ve got an order, you go to your local retail pharmacy to get your blood collected. We’re available in pharmacies in Austin today, on all sides of Austin, and expanding beyond Austin soon. Once you arrive at the pharmacy, you tell them that you’re there for the BetterWay test. They’ll collect a pea-sized blood sample from your fingertip after putting your hand on a hand warmer. And that enables them to collect either one or two tubes of blood, depending on the tests you’ve ordered, instead of large vials of blood from a needle in your vein."
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