3 ms·

I don't recall any patients being hurt by their technology, since they took "real" blood draws and ran analyses on those. I presume those analyses were what ma

I don't recall any patients being hurt by their technology, since they took "real" blood draws and ran analyses on those. I presume those analyses were what made it into whatever lab report. So suppose they screwed up 2% of their cases because they weren't licensed to do this (or did they forward to qwest?) You would still have to find victims to make a damaged claim. The investor damages story seems more straightforward from a legal perspective, but IANAL.

dilap 4y ago
Weren't they using blood draws too small to give accurate results w/ the traditional equipment they were using?
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  Maybe I misremembered, but I thought they generally had a real draw that they were diluting from to run on their machine, that was also analyzed.
  - antonjs 4y ago
    That's one of the things they were doing, but the other machines they were using weren't designed or tested to use diluted samples. At least the sensitivity of the test would suffer, but really it's out of spec and so unknown.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  From what I remember (from the book Bad Blood), most patient uses fell into one of two categories: either they were drawing a large draw, running on their machines and traditional machines to check correctness, and giving what they deemed correct from these (likely the traditional machine answer), or they were just outright running large samples on traditional machines with no attempt to do anything new. I think there were a few cases of patients getting the wrong results, maybe they were correcting later, but all in all it was not a huge issue for patients given how it was running in practice. This is not to excuse the practices in any way, but I do get why the focus in the trial was not on defrauding patients.
jmcgough 4y ago
They did find some victims - they told a cisgender woman that she had prostate cancer, despite not having a prostate. Think there were some other pregnancy and miscarriage scares. But I have to wonder how often Quest screws up there tests, like if you wanted to find people upset about a mistake Quest made, you could probably find some.
- Someone 4y ago
  I agree that the false positives (I wouldn’t call these mistakes, and certainly not screw ups) might be about as common as with other companies. After all, they often more or less did the same tests (but IIRC, ¿sometimes? with samples that were too small to work well) I also think it would be much harder to prove intent to hurt than intent to defraud investors, making it easier to prosecute for fraud.

dilap 4y ago

Weren't they using blood draws too small to give accurate results w/ the traditional equipment they were using?

throwawaymaths 4y ago
Maybe I misremembered, but I thought they generally had a real draw that they were diluting from to run on their machine, that was also analyzed.
- antonjs 4y ago
  That's one of the things they were doing, but the other machines they were using weren't designed or tested to use diluted samples. At least the sensitivity of the test would suffer, but really it's out of spec and so unknown.
danpalmer 4y ago
From what I remember (from the book Bad Blood), most patient uses fell into one of two categories: either they were drawing a large draw, running on their machines and traditional machines to check correctness, and giving what they deemed correct from these (likely the traditional machine answer), or they were just outright running large samples on traditional machines with no attempt to do anything new. I think there were a few cases of patients getting the wrong results, maybe they were correcting later, but all in all it was not a huge issue for patients given how it was running in practice. This is not to excuse the practices in any way, but I do get why the focus in the trial was not on defrauding patients.

jmcgough 4y ago

They did find some victims - they told a cisgender woman that she had prostate cancer, despite not having a prostate. Think there were some other pregnancy and miscarriage scares. But I have to wonder how often Quest screws up there tests, like if you wanted to find people upset about a mistake Quest made, you could probably find some.

Someone 4y ago
I agree that the false positives (I wouldn’t call these mistakes, and certainly not screw ups) might be about as common as with other companies. After all, they often more or less did the same tests (but IIRC, ¿sometimes? with samples that were too small to work well) I also think it would be much harder to prove intent to hurt than intent to defraud investors, making it easier to prosecute for fraud.