large number of uninsured patients, who they believed would be
especially receptive to the low prices Theranos offered. So, in addition
to its one Palo Alto location, the company had just opened two
wellness centers in Walgreens stores in the Phoenix area, with plans
for several dozen more. Elizabeth planned to open a second lab in
Phoenix, but for now the finger-stick samples collected in the Arizona
stores were being FedExed back to Palo Alto for testing. The
arrangement was far from ideal: the nanotainers were shipped in
coolers, but the coolers heated up when they sat baking in the sun for
hours on the airport tarmac. This caused the blood in the little tubes to
clot.
Just as had been the case before the launch when they were still
testing employee samples, Alan was also encountering issues with
potassium results. The blood in the nanotainers was often pink, a
telltale sign of hemolysis, and the potassium results the diluted
samples were producing were consistently too high. Some were so high
that the only way they could have been accurate was if the patients
were dead. The problem got so bad that Alan implemented a rule that
no potassium result above a certain threshold could be released to a
patient. He pleaded with Elizabeth to pull the potassium test from the
Theranos menu. Instead, she sent Daniel Young to try to fix the assay.
—
IN EARLY 2014, Tyler Shultz was moved from the immunoassay group
to the production team, which operated downstairs in Normandy. This
put him back near Erika and other colleagues from the clinical lab who
were processing patient samples on the Edisons and the modified
Siemens ADVIAs. There were no physical barriers between the two
groups, so Tyler could hear the chatter among the lab associates. Tyler
learned from Erika and others that the Edisons were frequently
flunking quality-control checks and that Sunny was pressuring lab
personnel to ignore the failures and to test patient samples on the
devices anyway.
As he debated what to do, he got a call from his grandfather. George