YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Strom

lines on the record: 74
first: 2022-06-17
most recent: 2022-06-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Know a simple thing like a scheduling program from someone who has done an analysis and says that we want doctors to see patients every 15 minutes and get a 10 minute break for coffee and that sort of thing has made being a doctor, being a physician less enjoyable. You have less freedom. People are feeling more like they're just employees than they have a vocation.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To favor primary care. And that again changes the equation. So I guess what I would say is be careful when you legislate anything that has to do with medicine. I don't know if I would become a physician if I were a young person today. It's much harder. So let me tell you what, you know, one way that costs is being controlled in medicine is with scheduling. So our hospital was purchased by another hospital. They introduced a scheduling program. Well, I noticed that they were going to schedule me 15 minutes to see every patient. I said, wait a second, I'm a geneticist. I can spend an hour with a patient. I can spend an hour and a half with a patient. They said, tough. They said, you know, if you do that, then your patients are going to be waiting in the waiting room and they're not going to be happy.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$20 worth of work on him. So that changed medicine incredibly. You say, well, you know, Medicare was Medicare. But then, you know, the insurance company used Medicare as a model. And that irrevocably altered the way medicine was practiced. The other thing about those Medicare regulations is they had better reimbursement for procedures. So specialties, which did a lot of procedures, colonoscopies, cardiac cathurizations became more powerful because the reimbursement was better and basically you could make more money. In that era, the general practitioners, the pediatricians, all got less reimbursement and it became harder for them to make a living. Then all of a sudden somebody says, well, these primary care people are not doing well. So then they changed reimbursement.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess what I'd say is one of the most important things that I've learned is unintended consequences. So I lived through the original Medicare guidance when the diagnostic related groups were formed. So this was in probably the 70s or 80s, probably the 80s. And basically the way that medicine was reimbursed was changed in alterably. So hospitals were paid not by what was done to a patient or for a patient, they were paid a single amount based on the diagnosis of that patient when they entered the hospital. So you would get the same amount of money for admitting a patients with Down syndrome for pneumonia, whether or not you did $200,000 worth of work on them or whether you did...”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out there that could be used for good. People are always worried about how it could be used for the bad. But people are listening to our phone conversations. They're paying attention to what we buy. That's the negative part. But on the other hand, I just turned on my computer on Google. There was something that I wanted. You know, it was like, how did, you know, how did the algorithm know that this would be something that I would be looking for because it wasn't obvious. And yet there it was. So it can be used for good as well as for bad. And so I think that, yes, there is reason for concerns about privacy. I would also say that the kids today, they don't care about privacy, right? They put everything on Facebook as soon as it happens. So maybe we're moving into a different era.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the weaknesses are. The computer algorithms, or else you're going to start being let off on Blind Alley. So that would be my advice to anyone who's getting into modern medicine is to understand the informatics, understand how these algorithms work, understand where their strengths are, where their weaknesses, or even become involved in the analysis, because it's incredibly powerful. I mean, there's an algorithm that basically looks at sales of Kleenex in pharmacies that predicts flu epidemics better than anything else. It's the same kind of algorithm that they use to map the craters of the moon. We live in an age where basically privacy is gone, but the other side of it is there is so much data.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say that there's been a fee change from in just the past 10 years in genetics. And it's going to be in medicine too, and that is you need to understand informatics. When I was even at quest diagnostics, my expertise was in what we call wet work. It was in making assays, you know, making methods to detect things and doing it in a better way. We talked about that a little earlier. Now pretty much everything goes on the DNA sequencer on the next generation sequencers. And so the wet work is almost irrelevant. But what isn't irrelevant is the analysis of the tremendous, the humongous amount of data that comes off those sequencers. And so I would say to someone who wants to go into genetic, you have to get a handle on the informatics. Whether or not you need to be a computer major or whether or not you need to be a programmer, that I don't know. But you need to be able to, because the computer folks don't know the medicine. And you need to know.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, my favorite book is Field of Dreams. My father was a baseball catcher, and it's one of the only books I've ever cried while reading. I think it's a better book than it is a movie, but I love the movie also. There's also a fabulous book called The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. Don't know if you've heard of it. But he combines genetics, music, and a couple of love stories together. More recently, as I told you, I've been reading all the detective Herona Vasche novels by Michael Connolly. And that's what I do for recreation”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mening. Then my boss, my chairman of my department, I was at a community hospital in Chicago. His name was John Barton. And he was a cowboy. And he taught me two things. He first taught me that to be a leader, you have to want what's best for your people more than you want what's best for you. He got such joy in our successes, and he did everything possible so that we could be successful. And the last one was William Nyhan. And Bill taught me that you have to know the basic science if you're going to treat patients. For example, he could give a lecture on diarrhea where you learned about what causes your diarrhea, not just how to treat the diarrhea. And so those are my mentors, and I thank God that I had.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He worked with Benjamin Spocking the famous book on childcare. And I was fortunate enough to have him as a professor at University of Chicago Medical School. And then he moved to University of California, San Diego. So when I went to do my residency, he was there for me too. And what he taught me is that the best way to be a pediatrician is to be with the child. He said, I want you to go hold babies. You know, if you're not an older brother, an older sister, hold babies walking around with babies, see how they feel. And you can tell simply by being with a baby by holding a child, whether this is a child who's just fussy and can be discharged or this is someone who is seriously ill. And those were the days before the meningitis vaccine when we were really concerned about it.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was basically saying that science and discovery is about what you're not expecting, just as Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin not looking for penicillin. He discovered penicillin because of an accident that mold started growing on its plates. And we've lost that in science, I'm afraid. We've lost that. Right now science is managed as a business. We're going to make a vaccine. We're going to do this, step, this step, this, step, this step, and make a vaccine. No one is saying, let's look at how antibodies are formed. Let's look at what's going on and see if there's anything anomalous, something that we don't understand. My next mentor was Dr. Sam Specter, Dr. Sam Spector, I guess you could call was one of the fathers of modern Pediatric.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky that whenever I needed somebody they were there. The first one was, of course, Albert Dorfman, who is my doctoral advisor. He was an MDH. He worked on inborn errors of metabolism. And he taught me one very important thing. He called me in one day and he said, you know, when I design an experiment and I think I know what the results should be and I get that result, I don't trust it”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and first of all, you talk about art imitating life and life imitating art. I mean, you know, he's president of Ukraine and the whole TV series is based on him going off on a rant about the corruption in government and getting elected to be president of Ukraine. I would highly recommend that.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I stream a lot. Guess I can also combine this. So I, during the pandemic, started reading Michael Connolly novels, Hieronymus Bosch, the detective. Is written over 20 novels. And of course then I streamed the Lincoln lawyer which is also from Michael Connolly. And I will be streaming the Bush legacy. Right now I'm watching Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which is an incredibly interesting Israeli film about the early days in Jerusalem watching Gaslit with Martha Mitchell. And a real cool one is Servant of the People. I don't know if you've been seeing that, Barry. That's the president of Ukraine. His original comedy show. Do you know about that?”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes a lot of centralized systems are not that great in some places, too. I mean, everybody points to Canada as being the best, a good example of a single-party payer, but I know a physician in Canada, and he needed his wisdom teeth out. And he had waited two and a half years to have his wisdom teeth. And a lot of people in Canada actually drive over to Buffalo to have CT scans because the whole city of Toronto has two CT scanners or something. There's a limited number of CT scanners per population. And so there's a long waiting list for those kinds of things. So it's not like single party payer is the panacea. Then if you ask how are you going to fix the system as it currently exists, it's a nightmare. And I have no idea how I would fix it.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of a sudden their geneticist wants to order that test and their insurance company doesn't cover it. One of the problems is that you would really want an informed consumer, but in healthcare, our consumers are not informed. You know, you look at these things when there's open enrollment and mostly everybody's looking at what the co-pay is, what this is, what that is. And it's not reasonable for people to understand whether or not they can have a cardiac catheterization or whether or not they can have a treadmill for certain indications, you know, because you don't know what the future is going to hold. So the paradigm of an informed consumer in a capitalist system with free enterprise, I think doesn't work very well for healthcare.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early days of when Papsmiers went to something called thin prep, you know, there was no question that the thin prep was better in terms of what it could do. But when patients would come to our clinic, there was a big bulletin board saying if the patient had this insurance, they could get thin prep. If the patient had that insurance, they could only get a regular pap smear. So what people don't understand is that their insurance companies in many ways are determining what kind of testing they can have, what kind of medical care they will get. And most people don't pay any attention to that. They don't pay any attention to whether or not holds exome coverage is covered by their insurance until they have a child that has autism or until they have a child that has developmental delay.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“running the laboratories from the central laboratory. So you have that going on. And then insurance companies love that because now there's competition. So they can say, well, I can get this from quest diagnostic. Why should I pay you this? And then you all know this story about United Healthcare and they went from Quest to Lab Corps and now they're in both. But insurance companies began to wield an increasing amount of power over healthcare. And they still wield that amazing kind of power because in many ways your insurance”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“try to consolidate the laboratory industry so he bought MetPath he bought other laboratories and basically got to a point where they were close to 8% of the total laboratory market share but it's still a very fragmented market you have the huge players the lab corps the quest bioreference people but still the majority of laboratory testing is done by individual hospitals so then how did individual hospitals no longer could they charge $250 for tests that they then only took them four hours to make so they had to come down with pricing and so now hospitals are working among themselves so now you have hospital chains buying up other hospitals”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were going to compete with the mom and pop local pathologists. And so they started buying up laboratories. Then Corning, who was making Corningware but also fiber optics, was also making laboratory flasks in Pyrex. They were making graduated cylinders. They were making flasks. So they decided that they were going to diversify and get into the laboratory industry. And they spun off and they started with Corning Clinical Labs and then they spun it off as quest diagnostics.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens here is evolutionary, and the way we evolved, of course, the way evolution occurs is with natural selection. So we're in a completely capitalist system here in the United States, and the way the laboratory industry evolved is it started out with, I guess you'd call a mom and pop. It started out that every hospital had a laboratory. That laboratory was run by the local pathologist. They drove the fanciest cars, I can tell you. You know, they were charging $200 and $300 for tests that cost them two or three dollars to run. And they were happy. The insurance industry didn't know any better. They were reasonably happy. And then a revolution occurred. Revolution occurred firstly with a laboratory called MetPath that decided that they were going to be a commercial laboratory.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To figure out what we're going to do with this technology. I know it's good. I know it works. You know, I just need to figure out how to do it from a business standpoint. So that's been my frustration.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, it's frustrating as to be a physician in the system can get extremely frustrating because, of course, we feel we know everything so that I say, if I say it must be so, it must be so. But seriously, it can be extremely frustrating. And my problem is that I have started a company. I believe I have a game-changing technology, but the chances of it actually changing the game are pretty small. And one of the problems that my company has is, you know, we're underfunded. I don't have the ability to go out and hire a marketer to hire a sales force, to hire people to deal with insurance companies. So I felt if I built a better mousetrap that the world would come to my door, but that has not happened. And so now, you know, I'm sitting trying to.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex process. I have a talk actually at PowerPoint that I can. I talk about somebody who invents the best test. I call it TBT. So somebody invents a test that can use your blood and decide with 100% sensitivity and specificity whether or not you got prostate cancer, for example. I lead the people through the person who invents that test to the point where quest diagnostics is no thank you. We don't want this test. And it is perfectly plausible. And that's because whether or not a test will be profitable depends on so many different interchangeable parts. And if the parts don't all fit together correctly, it won't be a profitable test. So that's the way the industry is.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, what a question. We could probably talk for an hour about that. Let's go. The short answer is it has become amazingly complicated to introduce anything new in medicine. So, back in the day, somebody would find something they would publish it. And then if it was good, it would be reproduced and then everybody would do it. And medicine progressed that way. Nowadays, it's completely different. You make a discovery, you talk to the technology transfer office at your university, they patent it, then you spin off a biotech company. Then you have to get venture capital funding for your biotech company. Then you shop it around, and then nobody trusts what you're doing because you're a private company. And then you have to get people to will interact with governmental payers, people who will interact with private payers, people who will work on the CPT codes. It is amazing.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extraordinarily frustrating. And sometimes even private insurance will say, you know, I don't want to cover this past, even though I want to scream at them. This kid needs this test. And that's the greatest frustration in medicine right now, at least in genetics for me, is not being able to get the test I need for my patients. And again, that's because there's no uniformity in insurance coverage for these sorts of genetic testing. I can see the position of the insurance companies are these are expensive tasks. And again, they want to be profitable. And if their fear is that if they start having to pay for these very expensive tests, that's going to eat into their profits. So, I mean, I do understand it, but it is extremely frustrating for a practitioner.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are two questions in there. The first is newborn screening is legislatively mandated in all 50 states. And the beauty of the legislative mandate is that the follow-up is covered. So these children who test positive for newborn screening, their treatments are covered, any follow-up genetic testing is covered. So that's, at least in California, is a great system. People, kids that fall through the cracks are the kids that don't have one of the diseases that is screened for in the newborn screening program. And these are children who, for example, Medi-Cal, which is the state-sponsored health insurance, doesn't cover whole exome sequence. So the kids who are covered by Medical can't have the test, which might identify a treatable cause of their illness. And that is a”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called a whole exone sequence, which allows where the laboratory basically looks at every gene known in the body and compares that with both parents to see about whether or not a child has a disease. Well, I did a test like that on a child that was hypotonic who couldn't walk. He was 18 months old, had spasmic movements, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. I did that test. It turned out he had a treatable inborn error of metabolism called congenital disorder of glycosylation, and we started to treat him. And he's getting better. So, you know, these kinds of things where it used to be very, very rare, it's almost like a revival meeting are becoming pretty common. But in order to do that, you have to be able to get the testing done. And that's the great frustration.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost in vegetative states. I now have a child in my practice who is identified by newborn screening, who is placed on a specialized diet, is now three years old and completely normal. Every time I see this kid, I want to scream how wonderful newborn screening is. Started out with phenylketinuria. Again, these are children who would have been horribly, horribly mentally deficient or put on specialized diets and they're normal. So these are the kind of kids I see. I also see children who have autism, children who have other forms of birth defects. Now we can get specialized DNA sequencing tests for these children to identify their disorders and perhaps treat. Now we have these”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's called newborn screening. Newborn screening is one of the most amazing phenomenon for disease identification and early treatment that nobody knows about. It's the heel stick that all your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have when they're born. And this is analyzed in California for about 50 different, what we call inborn errors in metabolism. And so these children are identified and these children need to be cared for by physicians who know how to care for these children with these extremely rare genetic diseases. It's been phenomenal. For example, there's a disease called gluteric aciduria, type 1, where every patient I ever saw back when I was working with Dr. Nijan was horribly, horribly brain damaged. These kids were”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you say, has there been any positive things? Well, one of the positive things that actually we now have mRNA vaccines where before COVID the estimate was it was going to be five to seven years before we had mRNA vaccines. But the other interesting thing that's happened is that telemedicine has become reimbursable, too reasonable levels. So when COVID hit, I said, you know, I'm of an age. I don't really feel comfortable driving up and working in a hospital. And they said, wow, would you see patients remotely by telemedicine? And I said, sure. And it's surprisingly good. You know, yes, I cannot touch patients, but I can see patients. And I've been seeing patients in clinical genetics that vary tremendously. Most states have”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in semi-retirement and I got a call from a children's hospital Los Angeles saying we have such a backlog of patients that need to see clinical geneticists and especially my subspecialty which is biochemical genetics back from the days with William Nyhant and this was actually right before the pandemic And Dr. Randolph, the chairman of the department, is such a wonderful woman, you know, but I said yes because if somebody asks you to help out, you help out. And I was really dreading it because I was going to have to drive up to Los Angeles and I live in South Orange County. And then COVID hit. And one of the interesting things that happened with the COVID epidemic, there's been...”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, in a single payer system, you don't have those kinds of issues. You can make those decisions easily. And that's in Canada, it's a much easier thing to do. You can simply say the public health system is going to be paying for this testing and then pretty much everybody gets it covered and paid for here. You could say, yeah, I think everybody should be paid for this testing, but insurance companies don't have to listen.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was pre authorized and the test was performed. A result was given, and then all of a sudden you're told you're not going to get paid for this because the doctor coded this as a routine office visit and not as an office visit because there was a breast lump found. So there is a huge part of the industry which basically has to take into account the fact that you're not going to get paid for a certain percentage of what you do. And there are actually, when I was a quest, there were people who are trying to work on just improving the percentage because, you know, you didn't have to do any more testing if you could improve your percentage of reimbursement from 40% to 50% or whatever it was. And so, you know.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Legislation that says you should have to Yeah, well, interestingly enough, just because the professional organizations say that this is standard of care and should be done does not mean that insurance companies will pay for it. Basically, insurance companies' role in life is to not pay for things. Our new CEO of Quest Diagnostics used to say, you know, what other business do you have where you give your services away for free? and then you hope and pray that you're going to get paid for it. And that's what lab testing is all about. The test is sent in. We send out the results and then we hope that insurance is going to reimburse us for those. It's not a great system. You can be denied for a whole bunch of reasons because the ordering physician put the wrong diagnosis code. Even though a person needed the test, the test was sent.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so logical. And don't think I didn't scream that. But the problem is, two things about that is, first of all, if all the insurance companies were going to get together and decide that they're going to do something like that, that would probably be considered collusion.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For cystic fibrosis carrier status when the woman became pregnant. When we knew and we had been given fair warning for that when I was a quest diagnostics, so we knew that volume was going to increase and the business people equest diagnostics knew that it would become profitable because insurers would have a difficult time saying it's research if the professional societies had recommended it. So that was kind of a no-brainer decision. Some of the other decisions that we had to make were not so easy.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're looking at the next quarterly earnings report. They're looking at the stock price. They're not necessarily looking at the long term. And in this country, insurance companies are, for the most part, profit. They're not non-profit. And they have to deliver value to their shareholders. And so sometimes they make short-sighted decisions. In the early days of DNA testing, the real problem was that the insurance companies didn't have relationships with companies that did it. And those tests were very expensive. So it was easier for them to say, this is research we're not going to cover it. In terms of cystic fibrosis, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Medical Genetics both came to a recommendation that every one of certain races should be tested.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the great ironies of modern medicine and healthcare is informatics. And I've had discussions with insurers about aspects like this. And some insurers will say, well, we know that people change insurance companies every two and a half to three years. So, why should I do this test if it's going to prevent a heart attack in a patient five or ten years down the line, which is incredibly short-sighted, I have to say, and not all insurance companies have this kind of attitude. But I would also say that in publicly traded companies, one of the things that I've seen is they're pretty myopic.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to do karyotypes looking at chromosomes, who is going to do DNA testing, was it going to be the pathology department? Was it going to be the genetics department? And when I got the quest diagnostics, which is a pathology company, I learned from them. I learned about quality assurance, quality control, what you have to do to do hundreds of thousands of tests in an accurate way and how you need to have methods in place to make sure that nothing is going wrong. So for me, it was an eye-opening experience. And the last thing I learned was that this is a business. How do you make a business decision? How do you try to balance health? That won't make a profit, but that could help people. How are we going to make those decisions? Do we make those decisions, those kinds of very difficult situations.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I felt like shaking them, saying, you know, get the test. You know, one of the reasons I went to quest diagnostics is because of quest diagnostics had relationships with all the major insurance companies. And so what I wanted to do is make these tests available to the general public. And I feel very proud that I was able to accomplish that. And we moved to sequencing and we moved to all the major platforms. And it was a great experience. I learned pathologists in general, it's interesting. There had been wars between pathologists and geneticists because pathologists feel that they own the rights to all testing that's done on humans. Geneticists said, hey, you guys don't know how to do the specialized things that we do. And so every hospital had this kind of give and take between who is”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we were able to start really doing high throughput, high quality testing. And then we just started increasing our menu. So because a lot of people, when I was practicing genetics, a lot of the frustration was that people couldn't get the genetic tests that I wanted them to get because often these tests were done in specialty laboratories. They were expensive. The laboratories did not have a relationship with the insurance companies. And so basically people had to either pay out of their pocket or not have the test. And it was very, very, very frustrating. I remember there'd be people who would drive their Porsche into my office and I'd say, you know, you really need to have cystic fibrosis carrier testing. And they'd say, does insurance cover it? And I'd say, well, let's check and know your insurance doesn't cover it. And they'd say, well, then I don't want to have it.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found initially what was interesting is that we invented something called the 1000 sample comparison that before we would introduce a new platform we would look at a thousand samples with the old technology and the new technology if there were any discrepancies we would resolve that discrepancy with a third technology to see what we were doing which would be the best platform and because a lot of people were using 100 samples well what we found is a lot of times with 100 samples there was complete agreement but as you got to 1000 samples there would be three four or five discrepancies between the two platforms no one had ever shown that before and we were able to show actually that the old technology was not as good as the new technology and so with a lot of confidence and we published about this we were able to move from the older technologies to the newer technologies”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I arrived at question in the year 2000. As you said, a large commercial laboratory, actually the largest commercial laboratory in the United States, and I believe that still is true. And they were just beginning to do DNA testing. And when I got there in 2000, they were using technologies that I had been using at University of Chicago that were really designed to do 10 or 20 tests at a time. They were not designed to do thousands of tests at a time. And so when I got there, I made it my business to try to find other ways of doing this testing that would be one high throughput, two extremely high accuracy, and three cost efficient because quest diagnostics was a business. And we were able to do that.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost to do the test is similar to what you'd have in a blood test, but the thing about a blood test is that there is a cost associated with drawing the blood. People don't really calculate that in. The ease of testing is amazing. You just put plastic wand with a sponge on the end of it into your mouth between your cheek and gums for two minutes so it can be done in the office. It can be done at home. It can be done in a nurse's office. And then it can be mailed in using the appropriate biohazard containers. So cost is low. Obviously, we're a company where there will be some markup, but certainly the cost is reasonable. And we feel that people may want to know.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's ridiculous, and there's no centralized database. You know, in this modern age, that's ridiculous. And when I went to the tennis tournament out in the desert, the BNB Paribas Open, they made a big deal about how everyone would be vaccinated and there was an app, and the app proved that you were vaccinated. But the way the app proved you were vaccinated is you took a picture of your vaccine card. You took a picture of your driver's license and they validated that you've been vaccinated. Well, that's not a real, because if I had a fake vaccine card. That would not establish anything. Again, with a saliva-based quantitative test, you could actually make sure that people had antibodies who you were hiring. Again, in Florida, that would be illegal most likely. But as I said, that's a political decision. That's not a medical decision.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, the CDC and FDA both have made public statements that they don't think that measuring antibody levels have any role in the pandemic. And I can see the point to them, as I said, in public health, everybody is a human being and everybody is the same. So that's been their position that we're going to make recommendations for everybody. And it'll work for most people. So the issue about whether or not to be vaccinated or not, that's a political issue about whether you can force vaccinations on people. I think a more interesting question is that certainly internationally, there is a problem with vaccine card counterfeiting. So that there are people who have not been vaccinated who present, and you know what your vaccine card looks like. I mean, how difficult would that be to counterpart?”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's going on? Some of the critics of antibody testing say, well, we don't want people doing risky behavior because they know they have antibodies. My response to that is, well, if you know you have antibodies and you've been vaccinated, you should feel free to do everything that the CDC says a vaccinated person should do. But I'm looking at the flip side. What if your antibodies are low? Then maybe you should not do everything that a vaccinated person could do and you should talk to your doctor about maybe doing something, either a booster with the same vaccine or a different vaccine to try to get those levels up. So again, there's not enough data to make any real recommendations at the moment. And I would like to think about using our test to To either do the research or to make their own informed decisions.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have less than 50% of the affinity. Than they do for the wild type. So this sort of, and we're able to make that assay because it's an open platform. We can make an assay for Omicron within weeks of when Omicron is first identified. So I think that these sorts of studies could really help inform.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your vaccine level, your antibody level is very low, and you've already gotten your four mRNA boosters. Well, now there's going to be a new vaccine this summer right here That's based on the old technology of antigen technology. So maybe that would be someone who would want to get that vaccine because they're not responding very well to the mRNA vaccines. Now, one of the issues in public health, everybody is treated like they're the same. And what we're finding in terms of antibody production and antibody affinity is that everybody is not the same. For example, with Omicron, some people's IgG antibodies that were made with the original Pfizer medina vaccines, they cross react nearly 100%. So that the antibodies that these people make are just as good against Omicron as they were against the original virus. On the other hand, some of the people, their antibody.”
2022-06-17 · Masters in Business · Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source