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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights David Stein, the co-founder and CEO of Ash Wellness, an at-home testing diagnostics platform that was originally developed to help LGBTQ+ patients with testing for HIV and diseases spread through sex. Ash now offers at-home testing for more than 100 conditions, including issues related to fertility, obesity, and heart disease.
Stein spoke with Healthcare Brew about his company’s expanding mission and how Ash benefited from the Covid-19 pandemic’s embrace of at-home testing.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe your company to someone who doesn’t work in healthcare?
We work with provider partners, be it digital health companies, universities, health systems, etc., to turn on self-collected testing. That means patients get a testing kit physically at home from us—it’s completely white-labeled, or in our partner’s brand—and they self-collect those samples. We ask patients to collect blood, urine, saliva, stool, swabs, whatever it may be. They then put all those samples back into the testing kit, which gets shipped back to one of our lab partners that does the testing. The diagnostic data is a kind of gatekeeper to that next step in the continuum of care. On the most broad, non-healthcare level, we do testing but from home.
How did the rise in popularity of at-home Covid testing during the pandemic affect your business?
Covid testing popularized the idea that you can test for anything from home. It did it not only for consumers like me and you, but for everyone in the value chain: for the insurance companies, for the clinicians. Everyone started to understand that. Obviously that’s been a huge help for us.
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You founded Ash to focus on the LGBTQ+ community. Can you tell me more about that and why you’ve since expanded its reach?
The idea initially had been to make sexual health more inclusive and accessible for the LGBTQ+ community because I had personal pain points as a gay man accessing sexual health services. And my other co-founders, along the same lines, had access issues as queer individuals. We really rallied around that idea and when Covid hit, we realized what a huge opportunity we had on the B2B side. We also realized that we could expand our mission, that it didn’t just have to be for sexual health and it didn’t just have to be for LGBTQ+ individuals.
We truly believe that we’re fulfilling our mission, which is now making healthcare, period, as accessible and as inclusive as possible by bringing diagnostics wherever is most convenient for patients. There are so many different kinds of barriers to access—be it social barriers, physical barriers, lack of transportation, lack of childcare—to getting to a health clinic, to going into a hospital. By bringing in diagnostics, which is what clinicians use to make 70% of medical decisions, to wherever is most convenient for patients, we believe we’re making healthcare more accessible.
We expanded from sexual health. We now work with over 150 different biomarkers. We work in areas like fertility, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, pre-diabetes, obesity, etc. All of these major issues affecting healthcare in America.