Theranos in Hot Water with CMS

The blood-testing company must respond to the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ allegations of substandard conditions at one of its labs.

Written byBob Grant
| 2 min read

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WIKIMEDIA, VEGASJONUpdate (April 18, 2017): Theranos announced yesterday (April 17) that it had reached a settlement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This means that the company has resolved all of its outstanding legal and regulatory troubles, that the CMS will not revoke Theranos’s clinical laboratory improvement amendments (CLIA) operating certificates, and that the federal agency has reduced its civil penalty against the firm to $30,000. Theranos “will not own or operate a clinical laboratory within the next two years,” as it had outlined last year, the company said in its statement.

Conditions at one of the laboratories operated by the diagnostics startup Theranos are so bad that, in some respects, they constitute an “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety,” according to the US government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The federal agency fired off a letter to Theranos’s lab director Sunil Dhawan earlier this week (January 25), warning that the company had 10 days to address unspecified problems with its blood-based tests, with its analytic systems, and with staff at a facility in Newark, California.

“This type of letter is one step down from ‘we’re shutting you down immediately!’” Tim Hammill, director of clinical labs for the University of California, San Francisco, told Wired. “Then again, any details are completely conjecture because the ...

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  • From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.

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