interactive iPad sales tool Theranos planned to use to pitch doctors.
As the months passed, Kate and Mike also began to develop
concerns about their strange and demanding client. Both were from
the East Coast and brought no-nonsense attitudes to their jobs. Kate,
who was twenty-eight, grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and played
ice hockey at Boston University. Her proper, small-town upbringing
had given her a strong moral compass. She also knew a thing or two
about medicine: her dad and her wife were both doctors. Mike, who
was thirty-two, was an Italian American from Philadelphia with a
cynical streak who ran track and cross-country in college and graduate
school. People didn’t bullshit or take kindly to it where he came from.
Elizabeth wanted the website and all the various marketing
materials to feature bold, affirmative statements. One was that
Theranos could run “over 800 tests” on a drop of blood. Another was
that its technology was more accurate than traditional lab testing. She
also wanted to say that Theranos test results were ready in less than
thirty minutes and that its tests were “approved by FDA” and
“endorsed by key medical centers” such as the Mayo Clinic and the
University of California, San Francisco’s medical school, using the
FDA, Mayo Clinic, and UCSF logos.
When she inquired about the basis for the claim about Theranos’s
superior accuracy, Kate learned that it was extrapolated from a study
that had concluded that 93 percent of lab mistakes were due to human
error. Theranos argued that, since its testing process was fully
automated inside its device, that was grounds enough to say that it was
more accurate than other labs. Kate thought that was a big leap in
logic and said so. After all, there were laws against misleading
advertising.
Mike felt the same way. In an email to Kate listing items that needed
legal review, he included “Automation makes us more accurate” and
wrote in parentheses next to it, “this sounds like a puffery claim.” Mike
had never worked on a marketing campaign that involved medicine
before and wanted to proceed extra carefully. Usually, health-care
campaigns, such as those involving pharmaceutical companies, were
handled out of New York by a special division of the agency called