April 9, 2026 | When Web Golinkin joined Babson Diagnostics as an advisor in mid-2024, he did what experienced healthcare executives do: he listened, watched, and formed a thesis. After eight months advising, a brief stint as president and chief commercial officer, and now one month into the CEO role, his thesis has hardened into conviction.
“Providers are keenly interested in this technology, and ultimately will pilot and deploy it,” Golinkin told Diagnostics World in a joint interview with Babson founder and COO Eric Olson. “I feel very certain about that.”
Babson Diagnostics has spent nearly a decade building the technology Theranos promised but failed to deliver: routine blood testing from a single fingertip prick, without a phlebotomist, at clinical-grade quality.
When Babson published a landmark study in the Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine (DOI: 10.1093/jalm/jfaf059) in September 2025, the company had validated 39 tests. Today that number is out of date. “We’ve actually commercialized 68 different tests,” Olson said by way of update. The expanded menu now includes a full thyroid panel, iron testing, a pregnancy test, high-sensitivity CRP for cardiac risk, uric acid for gout, and GGT for liver health. Hormones, brain health markers, infectious disease panels, and cardiac biomarkers are in the pipeline.
All of it runs on the company’s BetterWay blood testing platform: a system that collects capillary blood from the fingertip, processes it through a proprietary sample preparation workflow, and ships it via courier to a centralized CLIA-certified lab—no venipuncture, no phlebotomist required. Training takes about three hours.
The company launched BetterWay tests locally in Austin in May 2024, rolling out nationally at Sam’s Club locations in April 2025. The company has sustained a 79 net promoter score (a metric of customer loyalty from -100 to 100) through its second year of commercial operations, a figure that both executives cited repeatedly and contrasted favorably with the negative NPS scores they said are common in traditional lab testing.
“Theranos was all about the promotion, and the technology was never there. This company was a science-first company for a decade and is really now just beginning to aggressively promote the service,” Golinkin said.
The company does not have the luxury of pretending Theranos never happened. Every pitch, every provider meeting, every conversation with a skeptical lab director carries the weight of that 2015 collapse.
“There is a Theranos hangover, if you will,” Golinkin acknowledged. “It’s inevitable.”
But he argues that the cure is in the data: 52 IRB studies, more than 5,000 study participants, more than 950,000 tests run, and two peer-reviewed journal publications (JALM above, and JALM, May 2025, DOI: 10.1093/jalm/jfaf005). It’s a body of evidence that Theranos, famously, never produced.
Olson refused to write off the skepticism as residual anxiety. Capillary blood is notoriously difficult to work with. Samples are prone to hemolysis. Volume is limited. Pre-analytical error—the kind that happens before a specimen ever reaches the analyzer — accounts for the vast majority of laboratory mistakes. Many point-of-care approaches, he noted, skip the sample preparation steps that clinical labs treat as non-negotiable.
“These are real concerns,” Olson said. “This is not unnecessary drama.”
Babson’s technical answer to those concerns centers on three innovations: a novel reverse centrifugation method that conserves sample volume; a proprietary automated sample preparation device that mixes, centrifuges, and refrigerates specimens; and assay miniaturization designed specifically for small-volume capillary samples. The company holds patents on all three.
Olson said the pushback comes predominantly from providers, not patients. “Providers who understand the challenges with capillary blood firsthand are the most sensitized to it,” he said.
A Businessman Walks Into a Science Company
But patients still hold the power of the purse, and Golinkin, with 35 years’ experience and five companies behind him, knows what drives them. He founded one of the first companies to place healthcare clinics inside retail outlets, and his confidence in the commercial opportunity rests on a market observation he has watched play out for decades: when patients have a strong preference and the clinical quality is there, the service eventually wins.
“Sometimes it takes longer than you want it to,” he said, “but I’ve seen firsthand that if you have a service that patients prefer and it produces clinically accurate results, eventually that service will prevail.”
Asked how he intends to push commercial momentum without eroding the science-first culture Olson spent a decade building, Golinkin didn’t hedge. “I fundamentally and deeply understand that this company needs to continue to be a science-first company,” he said. “Because that’s what’s carried us to this point, and that’s what will win in the end of the day.”
The statistics he cites to support that case are striking. Roughly 70% of medical decisions depend on blood testing. One in four patients is needle-phobic. Half of venipuncture draws require a second attempt to secure a sufficient sample. Nearly a third of patients are non-adherent to testing due to some combination of needle anxiety and phobia.
“Over a period of 75 years, patients really haven’t had any choice,” Golinkin said. Now they do.
Going Where the Patients Already Are
Babson’s commercial strategy targets large health systems and major ambulatory care providers — CVS MinuteClinics, Amazon One Medical, and their peers — rather than building its own direct-to-consumer collection infrastructure. The logic is straightforward: there are hundreds of thousands of existing outpatient facilities in the U.S. that already have patient traffic, extended hours, and a need for blood testing. “We don’t have to build patient service centers,” Golinkin said. “All of these ambulatory care facilities are patient service centers. We just have to enable them to do blood collection in a more patient-friendly way.”
The company offers clinician-initiated and consumer-initiated testing in parallel — both options are available on its website — but views the healthcare provider channel as the larger and more strategically aligned opportunity. Babson’s core advantage, Olson explained, is clinical-grade quality, and that advantage resonates most in environments where quality is the explicit standard.
Pilots with large health systems are forthcoming, Golinkin teased, saying announcements are expected soon. Late last month, the company announced a five-year clinical affiliation agreement with The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing through the city-funded Advancing Mental Health and Emotional Nourishment (AMEN) project. Under this partnership, Babson Diagnostics will provide training in the use of its BetterWay capillary blood collection technology as an integrated component of select undergraduate nursing courses and will supervise outreach events where students perform BetterWay's fingertip collection for underserved populations.
The company’s centralized lab model is the current commercial approach, though the platform is designed to integrate with health system labs as well. Babson can supply the collection technology and sample preparation while a health system’s own CLIA lab handles the analytical work, a flexibility the executives said matters as they navigate different institutional arrangements.
The Ecosystem: BD, Siemens, and What Comes Next
Babson did not build its technology in isolation. The company was originally spun out of Siemens and has partnered with BD since 2016, a nearly decade-long relationship that Olson described as consistently aligned around the shared goal of bringing capillary blood testing into the mainstream.
But Babson holds numerous patents and trade secrets, including the reverse centrifugation technique and its automated sample preparation device, that Golinkin says allow it to operate with meaningful independence even within those partnerships.
Olson framed Babson’s IP advantage in historical terms. The company entered the capillary blood space early enough that the intellectual property landscape was largely open. “We had the chance to invent a lot of fundamental technologies that make capillary blood work,” he said.
Looking beyond the immediate commercial push, Olson, who co-authored standards for data security in clinical diagnostics and came to the industry from a computer science and biology background, offered a broader view of where laboratory medicine is heading. The next frontier, he argued, is not the analyzer or the automation or even the reagent. It is the sample itself. Most laboratories today, he said, have no visibility into how a specimen was collected, how it was transported, or what conditions it was exposed to before it arrived. The result is that a large share of laboratory errors occurs pre-analytically and are essentially invisible to the lab reporting the result.
“Labs don’t have a way of knowing whether they reported the right result or not,” Olson said. “So the field that we’re in—sample management, sample preparation, sample transportation, and all the technology that enables laboratories to gain control of the sample—is the biggest opportunity we have to improve quality and lower cost in clinical laboratory science.”
For Babson, that vision and its near-term commercial ambitions are intertwined. If the company’s technology can normalize fingertip blood collection at scale, it would also, by design, bring structured sample management into thousands of care settings where it currently does not exist.
Whether large health systems move fast enough to match the executives’ optimism is another question. Golinkin, who has been on the provider side of those conversations, is clear-eyed about the pace. “This is not going to be a transition that happens overnight,” he said. “But it is happening, and it will gather momentum.