MedTech Unplugged, the Future of AI in Healthcare & Life Sciences | David Stein, Babson Diagnostics

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David Stein

Executive Director

Babson Diagnostics

Inside the MedTech revolution: 5 ways AI and robotics are redefining care delivery

Patient-centric care is no longer a future goal; it’s the foundation of today’s most groundbreaking medical innovations. From artificial intelligence-driven diagnostics to brain-computer interfaces and robotic precision in fertility and massage therapies, technology is accelerating personalized treatment in ways that once seemed unimaginable.During conversations at theCUBE’s New York Stock Exchange studio, theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down with MedTech leaders who are rethinking how care is delivered. Their conversations revealed a shared vision: using automation, AI and smart design to make healthcare more precise, accessible and truly centered on the patient

play_circle_outline Transforming Blood Testing: Babson Diagnostics' BetterWay Revolutionizes Patient Experience with Easy Fingertip Collection

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Blood Collection: Becton, Dickinson's Innovative Device Reduces Sample Size and Minimizes Waste

play_circle_outline Transforming Healthcare: Enhancing Patient Satisfaction and Compliance Through Automation and the BetterWay Approach to Health Screenings

play_circle_outline Babson positions itself as a complementary solution to incumbents like LabCorp and Quest.

play_circle_outline CEO David Stein emphasizes a commitment to a science-first approach with patient feedback driving innovation.

Episode Info
Transcript

David Stein, Babson Diagnostics

July 25, 2025

David Stein

Executive Director Babson Diagnostics

In this MedTech Unplugged segment, David Stein, CEO of Babson Diagnostics, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante to unpack how Babson is transforming diagnostic blood testing through its BetterWay platform. Stein outlines how Babson is eliminating long-standing pain points in blood collection with a fingertip-based device co-developed with Becton, Dickinson and processed through a highly automated lab system in partnership with Siemens.

Stein dives into how Babson’s end-to-end ecosystem reduces blood waste by 93% and requires 55% less sample volume, all while ... Read more

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What is the purpose and mission of Babson Diagnostics? add

What is the process described for collecting and utilizing serum from blood samples, and how does it compare to traditional methods in terms of efficiency and waste? add

What advantages does the automated system provide in terms of convenience and speed of results for blood testing? add

What is the impact of the BetterWay solution on healthcare organizations and patient preferences? add

What were the feelings and motivations behind the development of BetterWay blood testing? add

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David Stein, Babson Diagnostics July 25, 2025

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody, welcome back to MedTech Unplugged. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the NYSE Wired plus theCUBE's ongoing Media Week series. I'm here with John Furrier as well. David Stein is also here. He's the CEO of Babson Diagnostics. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on.

David Stein

>> Great to see you, David, and great to be here. It's very exciting.

Dave Vellante

>> I'm really excited about this conversation because we all can relate to what you guys do. Tell us about the company and why you guys started it.

David Stein

>> Sure. Diagnostic blood testing is most likely the most important thing you do for your health, but it's something that very few people like and it's something that hasn't changed in over 70 years. And what we've done at Babson Diagnostics with BetterWay blood testing is create a highly preferred patient experience by enabling a very easy fingertip collection deployed at highly accessible locations. We're everywhere from retail pharmacies to doctor's offices, to even lobbies of employers such as New York Stock Exchange. Doing all that while providing highly accurate, broad results that your clinicians can use, you trust and your health insurance reimburses.

Dave Vellante

>> So the last time I had blood work done, it was in my doctor's office and I was getting chatty and the poor gal, I was distracting her, so she forgot to put the rubber band on and she's having trouble finding the vein and I said to her, "You need the rubber..." And so she took like four or five tries to do it, it actually, it looked like an addict. And so what you're describing is like music to my ears.

David Stein

>> What you bring up is a common problem. Diagnostic blood testing is the most ordered medical intervention yet it suffers from 30 to 40% noncompliance. If you talk to people and you say, "Why don't you get it done?" It's exactly what you said. Since the late 1940s, the approach of sticking a needle in your arm is the way blood is collected, people don't like it. Majority of people, I would say a large part of the population have difficult veins or some kind of reaction to it or have an experience such as yours. So when we thought about our product BetterWay, we said, "We've got to make the collection experience something that people really prefer, but also something that's highly automated so somebody in a phlebotomy center or at a retail pharmacy or at your doctor's office can easily collect." And I think all the things you brought up of making it less scary, lower friction and really easy is something that we have in BetterWay. And it all starts again with a simple collection from your finger using a device that we developed with Becton, Dickinson.

Dave Vellante

>> You have show and tell?

David Stein

>> I have a device here, it's easy. We can't bring our whole ecosystem, so we truly re-imagine the end-to-end diagnostic ecosystem when it comes to making collection easy, when it comes to automating all the processes so you can deploy it in a decentralized location and then coupling it with a highly automated lab. But it starts with a simple collection. Again, we developed this with Becton, Dickinson, this is the BD MiniDraw, and again, it was co-developed with us. Very simple on your finger, single-use lance through here, folds down, and the person collecting it just pushes on these ears.

Dave Vellante

>> It drips, yeah.

David Stein

>> And it's a closed system. And in the end, this is the tube. And from this tube we're able to do a very large number of tests because we really looked at that end-to-end ecosystem and optimized it when it comes to not wasting blood, when it comes to automating all the processes, all the processes that get done to mix the blood to centrifuge it. And then in our lab with our partner Siemens, we've miniaturized the biochemical processes or the recipes needed to analyze the blood to need 55% less blood. So what's really cool about what we do is it's very transparent and everybody could understand it. And if you go to Betterway.com, it's right there. We take you through our science, we take you through actually our results. And what's super cool for us is we just had a landmark publication in the Journal of Applied Lab Medicine by the who's who in Diagnostics looking at BetterWay. So simple collection, fully automated pre-analytics and miniaturized assays on the back end compared to venipuncture compared to conventional testing and the paper speaks for itself.

Dave Vellante

>> You said 55% less blood, but it seems to me to be even greater advantage because you're... I'm used to three or four, maybe even more large test tubes, that is so much smaller than what I'm used to.

David Stein

>> I think you threw it a little bit. I tried to simplify it, but you bring up a really great point. So we collect here about 435 microliters, about the size of a pea. And what we're talking about here is the clear part of your blood, this serum, we then use Babson IP built into the BD tube to maximize the utility of that serum where we waste 93% less of the blood because in a conventional large tube, a significant amount of that blood is wasted. And then we couple that with our highly automated lab where the sample is placed on high volume systems where we need 55% less.

Dave Vellante

>> I see.

David Stein

>> So it's that convolution of collecting a high-quality sample, relatively large for capillary, but still about a 10th of the volume of venipuncture, wasting 93% less so just we only waste about nine microliters so a fraction of a drop of blood and needing 55% less is that end-to-end ecosystem where there's no more black box where you could look at every step of the way and say, "It's scientifically rigorous, we've done over 45 IRB studies, approaching a million tests as part of studies." And what's even more exciting, we're commercial. So with BD secured two 510(k)s on these tubes, we have FDA listing across the end-to-end ecosystem. We're reimbursed by Medicare, Medicaid, United, Blue Cross Blue Shield. And what's really made it worthwhile, our team's been working on it for 10 years, is when you have a patient who says to you, "Wow, I now have a solution that works for me." And when you look at our 79 net promoter score, this is world-class not only in diagnostics, but world-class for any organization. That's something we're really proud of.

Dave Vellante

>> So a couple of things. So basically all those test tubes that they collect, it's almost like over-provisioning in technology just in case. And much of that blood probably just gets thrown away so they don't need to collect that much. And the second question I have is, presumably you're able to get to results faster because you've got this automated system at the other end, is that true?

David Stein

>> We're hyper-focused right now on outpatient ambulatory meeting you where you are in your daily routine.

Dave Vellante

>> Convenience.

David Stein

>> Very much convenience. So we're approaching 30 different locations in Austin, Austin and surrounding Austin areas where we launched. We're proud to be headquartered in Austin, Texas. And there you can get our blood testing, your blood collected at HEB, a large retailer in Texas, Sam's Club as part of Walmart, People's and several other locations. And what's great about that is the transaction is super quick. Your clinician either place an order with, sends you to BetterWay or in Texas you can customer initiate broad testing. You walk in, quickly get collected, and then depending on when you went there during the day, whether our courier came or not, you'll get your results later that day or the next day. So typically people are very impressed by how fast they get their results. And we spent a lot of time on the customer facing or the patient facing lab report where we spent a lot of time giving you a companion of your health, explaining what your results mean so that you feel empowered when you talk to your clinician or you feel empowered taking charge of your health.

Dave Vellante

>> So how does that work? You have to train people obviously to take the blood, which it seems like it's pretty straightforward. And then they handle the...

David Stein

>> No, you have it exactly. We've trained over 200 people to collect for us commercially. They're typically cashiers, pharmacy techs, front office staff, very few, counting the single digits, were phlebotomists. Most show up never collecting blood before. We have a beautiful training program, it's about two hours. They walk in the morning never having collected blood and part of the BetterWay process with the sample prep device you leave behind at the pharmacy is it talks them through the process, it's highly automated. The collection device is very easy to use. So again, all the friction points of phlebotomists needing to understand how to get to the vein, what tubes to collect, all that process we've now automated to take that guesswork out but also to improve operational efficiency. So when you look at where we're moving towards now, deploying with the largest healthcare organizations in the world, they want highly clinical relevant solutions that are very staff friendly and that are highly patient preferred and we check all those boxes. We can deploy in any location we take up basically a corner of a room is all we needed, less than this table to do collection. We could train any one of their staff members from their front desk clerk to anybody clinically. And as I said before, the patient experience is highly preferred with a 79 net promoter score. So all those friction points in the system that dates back to 1940s, we have really gone after, we've thought it through, we've spent 10 years developing, now what's beautiful is we have thousands of people experiencing it.

Dave Vellante

>> So is that the secret sauce? Is you guys just reimagined the workflow and have automated that? Is there other technology that you've developed? Is there AI involved?

David Stein

>> Yeah, very much so. All along the way. So what we did was we said, if you didn't want to make a compromise, if you said, "Need to be clinical results, need to have the same broad tests that payers reimburse as CPT codes, broad tests that your clinicians need to screen you for your annual wellness disease identification. And you have to make it a customer experience breakthrough." That was something people said was impossible. So we've spent 10 years systematically, the team, starting with Eric Olson, the founder, doing the initial skunk works and people that are still with us today, Chris , Roy Barr, Chris Tanzi, I can name a hundred people and I'm sorry I can't name the whole team. We have an incredible team of dedicated people that day in and day out looked at this challenge and said, "We're not going to compromise." And very quickly, and we started working with Becton, Dickinson on the collection device I showed you, very quickly started working with Siemens. So we have great partners in Siemens, the number one in diagnostics and Becton, Dickinson, the number one in sample collection is our partners. And we said, "If we had a blank sheet of paper and were able to truly reimagine its end-to-end ecosystem, what would you do?" And we spent, as I said, almost 50 IRB clinical studies in addition to numerous just sitting together, thinking it through, camping out in pharmacies, camping out in clinical sites and saying, "How would you reinvent this process?" And the biggest part of that was feedback from patients like you and patients like me. "Is this something we would use?" And that's what's really beautiful is we have tremendous technology from IP and a collection device to how we automate to people overuse it, but yes, we use AI around some of our results to make them equivalent to venipuncture. But everything along the way is using the regulatory framework necessary and something again we're very proud of.

Dave Vellante

>> What is your product? What do you actually sell and monetize?

David Stein

>> So we have two products. One is your doctors order you blood testing and you get results. So in that we're a tech enabled end-to-end solution where just like you would go to the incumbents like LabCorp and Quest, at the end of the day we bill insurance or bill the patient to get broad results. But also we have such an incredible solution when it comes to the collection experience that we have, we're now starting to work with the largest healthcare systems in the nation and even have a lot of international attention around, "Can you get me an automation ready tube to the lab? Can you bring the BetterWay collection experience to my health system?" So we have two business models and what's beautiful is it's based on that same underlying technology where either we do the end-to-end including our innovations in the lab or we enable large healthcare organizations to have an automation ready tube that they can process in their own lab.

Dave Vellante

>> So it's either a managed service that you charge for or you teach people how to fish and they go do it and they-

David Stein

>> We provide them with a front end service. So there's been a lot of beautiful businesses built on that where you have that same core technology that you offer an end-to-end service or you bundle core components of your technology and you sell them. And we're doing that.

Dave Vellante

>> So you've got the approvals, you're just rolling out now in Austin. You've rolled out in Austin, correct?

David Stein

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> How long have you been in Austin?

David Stein

>> We started our initial pilots in mid -24.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay.

David Stein

>> We continue to expand. Again, some things we've done is increased number of partners. We launched with Sam's Club in April and we've increased our menu. We're now over 60 tests available on our platform. These are the most frequently ordered tests and panels. We've increased payer coverage and you'll continue to see us do that. We had a beautiful event on the East Coast a few weeks ago in partnership with Hackensack Meridian Health where we did screening for men of color for prostate and other things. You'll see us more and more pop up around the country. Austin is great for us, it's our home market. Again, we proved it works, it scales, we've done over 30 locations now and people love it. And now we're going to take that to bring it across the nation.

Dave Vellante

>> So now you're scaling. Why does Sam's Club, why are they attracted to this? Because it's another way to just drive revenue, drive margin for them?

David Stein

>> Well, I think a lot of our partners want to provide their members or their customers with great services that the beautiful part of having brick and mortar location is you could provide tech enabled services and something like donating blood is something you can't do for broad testing at your home. You can't do it mail order. So more and more using those physical locations to offer services that you have to do in person.

Dave Vellante

>> It brings them into the store and then they buy stuff when they're there.

David Stein

>> Of course. Downstream, that's a benefit. But it's very similar for health systems. If you walk around here by the New York Stock Exchange, you see so many outpatient locations of leading health systems or healthcare organizations because they want David to become a patient that frequently interacts with them and God forbid you're 38% of the population that's pre-diabetic, now you're in their system. What is the most important step? If you're healthy, go get your blood tested. If you're sick, go get your blood tested. If you don't know, get your blood tested. If it's your first engagement with a health system-

Dave Vellante

>> How's your bloods?

David Stein

>> It's the most important thing you could do. So we reduce that friction, we reduce that friction in a way with BetterWay that you can deploy it in those locations in something that your patients will prefer and they'll love. Again, a perfect fit for modern healthcare, a perfect fit for the modern economy.

Dave Vellante

>> So you're very disruptive. You've mentioned a couple companies, you mentioned LabCorp and Quest. They've got the sort of entrenched old guard system. It's probably relatively now to what you're talking about, inefficient and expensive. So you're kind of disrupting that. How large is that market?

David Stein

>> In the US alone, the outpatient market is 50 plus billion dollars.

Dave Vellante

>> 50 billion, five, zero?

David Stein

>> Five, zero billion.

Dave Vellante

>> And I wonder if you expand the TAM because of the convenience factor. Maybe the average price goes down, but the volume explodes because it's more cost-effective, what you're describing, much more cost-effective.

David Stein

>> It's much easier to deploy. I think there's beautiful parts of our economy that showed this by making vaccines available at pharmacies, vaccines doubled from 2009 to 2019. Uber created three rides for every one ride they took from taxis.

Dave Vellante

>> I'm glad you excluded COVID in that. That's good. Well done.

David Stein

>> But I think what's also kind of unique about blood testing is you're dealing with 30 to 40% non-compliance so if you just add that on, there's a lot of us that are taking charge of our health. We want to be able to talk to our clinician or self-direct our blood testing. All these will expand the market and it's such a high leverage way of reducing downstream costs, improving health, improving outcomes, and just closing gaps in care. So what we'll see over the next years is more testing being done because you're not going to solve diabetes or heart disease or other chronic diseases by doing less testing. If anything, you want people to be compliant and get screened more frequently.

Dave Vellante

>> And I interrupted you, you were making an example of Uber. Carry that through.

David Stein

>> I think again, convenience grows economies because it reduces friction. My understanding is Uber created three rides for every one ride they took from taxis. So it's less about taking share from incumbents. LabCorp and Quest have a great infrastructure, they provide a great service. It's about how do you expand this market, how do you provide choice and how do you let the market speak and the patient and the consumers speak to what they want going forward? And healthcare, even though it's a giant part of our economy, might be one of the last ones where we haven't experienced convenience and accessibility and customer voice. But we will see.

Dave Vellante

>> So you see Babson as complimentary to the existing... Is that right? As opposed to disruptive?

David Stein

>> I think we've achieved what people thought was the impossible. We will disrupt the way it's done.

Dave Vellante

>> I was going to say, if I were those guys, I'd be buying you.

David Stein

>> We are disrupting. We have several customers and patients in Austin that will say, "I only want BetterWay."

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, I don't ever want to do that again. I'm going to tell my doctor, "Go get this. Go to Betterway.com."

David Stein

>> Now in healthcare it's step-by-step showing what we're doing. And part of our now reaching out to large healthcare organizations is the majority of orders in our health system is driven by these large health organizations where they're finding the BetterWay solution and what we've done at Babson highly attractive and in short order you'll start to hear those partnerships.

Dave Vellante

>> What's the gate to you scaling? As CEO, you want to scale this, you've got product-market fit, it's proven. What's the gate to scale and how fast can you scale? And what's next?

David Stein

>> Next will be these partnerships. You'll start to hear very large healthcare organizations that you know announcing they're working with us. So we're using these large healthcare organizations as our anchors to move geographically into different parts of America. So in Austin, we work from the bottom up with great partners on the collection side. And now what you'll see is we're going to start to also address the market top-down with large healthcare organizations.

Dave Vellante

>> And this device you showed us, that's your device, right? You manufacture that device?

David Stein

>> Becton, Dickinson manufactures it. They're a legal manufacturer, but we co-developed it with us.

Dave Vellante

>> You co-designed it?

David Stein

>> Co-developed it, yes.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. And it's manufactured in the US?

David Stein

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay.

David Stein

>> We have largely a US supply chain. Many of us have 25 years of experience in healthcare industry and in diagnostics. And it just really made sense to start our supply chain in the US. It allowed us to be really close to our manufacturers and also just we all were coming out of COVID and understood what went on there.

Dave Vellante

>> So you were part of the initial team?

David Stein

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> And when did you become CEO?

David Stein

>> I was part of the initial team that incubated this idea inside of Siemens.

Dave Vellante

>> So 2015?

David Stein

>> In 2015, it was a Skunk Works project and I left Siemens. We're very close to Siemens, they're a great investor, great industry partner. I left in early 2020, fell back in love with Babson and in towards the Q-3, Q-4 of 2020, I became CEO.

Dave Vellante

>> So people thought this was impossible. You had the Theranos thing go on, which freaked everybody out. What gave you confidence to leave your cushy job at Siemens, which you could probably do in your sleep, you probably had a good life, to come and take this chance. What gave you confidence given that people said it was impossible?

David Stein

>> I left my job at Siemens to take six months off. I left December 31st. Eric Olson, the founder and I had a call on January 2nd and he said, "Why don't you join and help?" And it's hit the ground running since then so that six months turned into two days. I've dedicated my life to diagnostics and many of our team has, majority of our team have dedicated their life to healthcare. Healthcare people are special. And what gave me confidence is we're a science-first company, we have incredible integrity, we're very humble when it comes to learning every day and said, "Hey, you know what? If we can truly reinvent the ecosystem, can we make this happen?" Over that ten-year journey, there were many times that we sat and we said, "Holy Mama, can we actually solve this technical challenge?" But together in partnership with BD and Siemens, we were able to do it. I can't lie to you and say when we started out in 2015 in Spunk Works and Siemens when Eric and I had that first conversation, that we were confident. I can't tell you that I was confident along the way, but as we started to approach launch, became more and more confident and we also became more and more driven as we saw people that the current art of phlebotomy didn't work for them and their eyes lit up when they were part of our clinical studies and said, "Holy mama, when can I do this?" It really added fuel to the whole team's fire to bring this forward. Because what's unique is we're all consumers. There's also a self-serving nature where our loved ones, where ourself all have to be tested and we want a better way. And that's why we named it BetterWay blood testing because we've always said there had to be a better way. And we've realized that better way.

Dave Vellante

>> There's no question it's a better way. All week we've been talking about the secular trends, one being the consumerization of healthcare and this convenience factor that you're bringing to the table is really exciting. I can't wait to try it.

David Stein

>> Well, everybody's invited to come down to Austin.

Dave Vellante

>> Bring it to Massachusetts.

David Stein

>> Please come down and visit us in Austin.

Dave Vellante

>> We're there all the time.

David Stein

>> I'm looking forward to-

Dave Vellante

>> We love Austin....

David Stein

>> to bringing it to Massachusetts and bringing it to the nation.

Dave Vellante

>> David, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE.

David Stein

>> Thank you very much.

Dave Vellante

>> All right and appreciate it, you being part of NYSE Wired. All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire CUBE and NYSE Wired. You're watching MedTech Unplugged. Keep it right there. We'll be back from the New York Stock Exchange right after this short break.