Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.
Elizabeth Holmes
I definitely am afraid of needles. It's the only thing that actually scares me.
With some diseases, like type 2 diabetes, if people get alerted early, they can take steps to avert getting sick.
Too often you see someone fall, break a rib, go in to the doctor and discover a tumor.
Every time you create something new, there should be questions. And to me, that's a sign that you've actually done something that is transformative.
The worst possible thing in the world is to have someone who doesn't believe in you.
The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood.
The right to protect the health and well-being of every person, of those we love, is a basic human right.
My father did a lot of disaster relief work, and he was always in places where there was a lot of pain.
I think a lot of young people have incredible ideas and incredible insights, but sometimes they wait before they go give their life to something. What I did was just to start a little earlier.
We know more about our credit cards than we know about our bodies.
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.
Patients are empowered by having better access to their own health information, and then by owning their own data.
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.
When I thought about having the greatest impact with my life, I thought about all the times people lose loved ones because diseases weren't detected early enough. I thought, 'I can play a role there.'
Today, blood work and science are able to provide more of a movie of your health, identifying trends before they become an issue.
I really believe that if we were from another planet, and we sat down to put our heads together on torture experiments, the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking their blood out would probably qualify as a pretty good one.
Thernos 1.0 is an external point-of-care BlackBerry.
Anywhere from 40% to 60% of people, when they're given a requisition by a doctor to go get tested, don't, because they're scared of needles or the locations are inconvenient or the cost is too high. And if you're not even getting tested, how is it possible that we're going to move toward an era of preventive medicine?
I love adventures.
What I really want out of life is to discover something new: something mankind didn't know was possible to do.
At a relatively early age, I began to believe that building a business was perhaps the greatest opportunity for making an impact, because it's a tool for making a change in the world.
I work all the time, and I'm basically in the office from the time I wake up and then working until I go to sleep every day.
What matters is how well we do in trying to make people's lives better. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I work the way that I work. And that's why I love what I'm doing so much.
We've created these little tiny tubes, which we call the 'nanotainers,' which are designed to replace the big, traditional tubes that come from your arm, and instead allow for all the testing to be done from a tiny drop from a finger.
I grew up in a family of people who wanted to make a difference in the world.
