By Arun Nair, PhD, Director, Specimen Management R&D, BD

Do you dread getting your blood drawn? You're not alone. People all too often put off health screenings that include “lab work” (aka blood draw) that could help them detect serious treatable conditions early. Whether it’s because they’re scared of the experience or it’s inconvenient to make and keep an appointment at a lab center and then possibly wait days for the results, avoiding blood draws could have negative consequences down the road.

Now imagine another way to get a blood test:

Whether your provider orders a blood test for you, or you simply want to order one for yourself, you would have the option to go online to an intuitive website where you select the tests you need, input your insurance information and/or payment securely. 

You head off to your local pharmacy, check in, and a trained pharmacy technician collects 10 drops of blood from your finger instead of several tubes of blood from your arm. This could be done with a patented finger collection deviceⁱ, currently undergoing clinical testing, which is potentially less invasive than a traditional blood draw, without sacrificing quality, accuracy or the number and types of tests that are available.

Imagine too, a step further into the future, the convenience of being able to collect your own sample at home and send it to the lab directly. BD and Babson Diagnostics teams are working together to create an innovative capillary (finger-based) blood testing ecosystem to make this vision a reality. (Click here to read the news release.)

As a member of the R&D team for the project, it’s amazing to be part of the journey to develop a product that can truly revolutionize a patient’s experience. This method will make blood testing more accessible in new care settings and increase overall access to care by helping people get the preventative health screenings that are so often important to better patient outcomes.

Our Purpose at BD is advancing the world of health^TM. In this video, Brooke Story, president of Integrated Diagnostic Solutions for BD, and I explain how this innovation addresses unmet needs within the current health care system of both patients and clinicians, and how the expansion of our strategic partnership with Babson Diagnostics will help us continue to make the blood collection experience even better in the future.

_{ⁱ The capillary collection device is an investigational device under 21 C.F.R. 812 and requires additional studies to make any definitive conclusions about safety or efficacy.}