Why did Theranos insist on using 'a single drop of blood.' Why not be able to run a normal blood sample through an unprecedentedly compact form factor testing unit. Wouldn't that be good enough?
(b) The original idea was that a patient would have one of these things _in their house_; a patient can't reasonably do a venous blood draw on themselves, but they can do a finger prick. There are some real working tests that work this way for this reason; HIV self-tests are normally finger-prick tests, say.
But by the time they'd repositioned as "the machines are in a pharmacy, or maybe a central lab", yeah, it made no sense anymore.
I mean, if I could walk into a Walgreens, choose from a menu of lots of different tests at transparent, low prices (IIRC a lot of their prices were great), get a normal, standard venous blood draw, and then have that draw analyzed while I finishes shopping at Walgreens so I could get my results in 15-20 minutes, I think that would be a fantastic experience.
Is there some reason the above is not possible or viable?
Also, the former seems to be a harder problem to solve than the latter.