Pastmaster: The Healthcare (Un)Professional.

 

Women today have almost conquered the world. Be it being a sommelier to walking on the moon, they have proved their acumen, skills and intellect. The journey of transitioning from ‘chairman’ to ‘chairperson’ has definitely been a long one, and one of the most fulfilling ones, to say the least. The number of female professionals today exceeds that of males, even so, sexism remains. The one way in which women choose to defeat sexism is to create an atmosphere devoid of it, and what better way to create a sexism free atmosphere to promote diversity at workplace, than to be a businesswoman?

 

The pandemic has made the world realize that Healthcare and Information Technology are the most revenue generating fields. A woman who was able to foresee the opportunity in the medical field even before the pandemic arose, is the founder of a now defunct technology start-up ‘Theranos’, Elizabeth Holmes, a Harvard drop-out. ‘Theranos’ was originally supposed to be a blood testing mechanism that was supposed to be more cost effective than the current pathology laboratories. The idea was that instead of an injection, the ‘Edison’ device would take the blood from the thumb and a dual advantage of avoiding the painful injection as well as save money.

 

Basing the idea of ‘Theranos’ on an emotional premise of not being able to bid adieu to her maternal uncle who died of cancer when Elizabeth was a child, she managed to impress her (ex) Professors, politicians in high positions, peers and in general the people in the healthcare industry. Elizabeth had a plan, a vision and the will to convert her dreams to reality. However, there was a slip between the cup and the lip. The ‘Edison’ device was far from efficient and many people who gave their blood samples were getting inaccurate results. At this point, any normal businessperson would take some time to understand what the inaccuracies were and then come up with a better model.  

 

But Elizabeth had a different plan. Instead of accepting the fact that operational difficulties do arise in any and every business, and hers was no different and/or infallible, she decided to take on a different road. In accounting terms, it would be something close to ‘misleading the stakeholders’ and in layman’s language, it would be ‘fraud’. It was at the time when Elizabeth should have taken a corrective action, she resorted to manipulative actions. She went to the extent of using bad quality machines that would fetch inaccurate blood test results, and which would naturally drastically differ from the normal blood test results conducted in pathological laboratories.

 

Elizabeth had intelligence, the ability to manipulate by using an emotional premise, and most of all she had the ‘woman’ card. It is a sad reality that even though laws were made in favor of women to incentivize innovation, workplaces and hard work and the right to be treated fairly, the very ideals Betty Fridan and Gloria Steinem fought for, women like Elizabeth made complete misuse of it. Even when her business was falling apart and many of her pathology laboratory staff understood that Elizabeth was misleading the investors, some of whom tried to raise their voices were either asked to not overstep the mark or were even terminated from their jobs. The ones who were not terminated from their jobs resigned on some pretext or the other.

 

When a start-up in a powerful place like Silicon Valley has investors with big money involved, the attrition rate is sure to be noticed. To this date, many healthcare professionals who were ex-employees of ‘Theranos’ prefer to show a gap on their CVs rather than admit that they worked at that place. While the staff was noticing the loopholes in the functioning of the ‘Edison’, Elizabeth and her team was quite successful in alluring the investors to invest a good amount of money in her start-up. The start-up even went to the extent of asking the employees to keep Elizabeth in the CC in every e-mail that were sent by the employees to each other.

 

Be it attempting to bribe the FDI Officials in order to secure drug safety approvals to throwing big parties for infinitesimal reasons or even appointing the top corporate attorneys as In-house Counsels, Elizabeth and her team were doing everything they could to retain the existing staff and increase the amount of control they exercised over them. But there comes a time when every wrongdoer must pay for what he has done. Enter John Carreyou, a whistleblower and journalist who noticed the chain of inefficiency in blood test report generation, the attrition rate of the staff and went on to interview the latter, after which he wrote an expose on Elizabeth and brought down her façade.

 

She was arrested on the charges of fraud, and the intelligent and foresighted woman who once tasted the zenith of success went through the nadir of being arrested. HBO even made a documentary describing ‘Theranos’’ journey from being a top tech start-up to a now defunct Company titled ‘The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley’, directed by Alex Gibney. Women like Elizabeth Holmes are the reason why people talk of the flip side of feminism and even go to the extent of saying that women use the ‘feminist’ card to make wrongs right, and the truth of this sadly cannot be denied. 

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Author: Ms. Radhika Sunil Vaidya. 

E-mail i.d:   radhika.vaidya98@gmail.com

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