Why Robot Blood Draws Are Better for Workers and Patients - DTNS WEEKEND

**Tom Merritt** (0:09)
Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition, gratefully provided to you, and thanks for your support of this show, focusing in on some stories that we talk about in the news. Last week, we mentioned a Dutch company called Vitestro, receiving the first US FDA approval for a standalone robotic device that can draw blood for blood tests. It's called the Aletta. It can read a patient's arm, choose a vein, and draw blood in two and a half minutes on average. I think we said a minute 49 last week. That's the fastest that they saw it go. Two and a half minutes seems to be the average.
That's according to its clinical trial. Typical human phlebotomist takes approximately four to five minutes. A human is still needed with this robot. They supervise, but they can supervise up to three devices. The human still confirms the proper tube order, the volume, all of the labeling, all of that, and checks on you, make sure you're doing okay. So I immediately sent this to Dr. Gary Tolbert to be like, all right, what do you think of this? And you were pretty excited about it.
Thanks for joining us, Dr. Gary. Appreciate it, man.

**Gerry Tolbert** (1:18)
Glad to be here. Yeah, it was incredibly interesting to see the technology that we've been asking for, for so long, showing up in real life. We see these robots that can help us with a lot of different things. We do robotic surgeries right now. In fact, it's amazing technology. But to see it doing something that is so mundane for us on the physician side is really cool.

**Tom Merritt** (1:38)
All right, so before we get into what it does, why should we believe you? Like, what is your experience with blood draw? I'm sure people could guess because you're a doctor, but I think you have some more interesting experience than people might guess.

**Gerry Tolbert** (1:51)
It's possible. So back in the day, long time ago, even back before I became a physician, it was commonplace for interns and other first year medical students and second year medical students and third year medical students. They were the ones that did a lot of the blood draws and collections on the wards.
When I came through, we did a little bit of that, but when I got out of medical school and finished residency, I went in to practice with my dad doing what's called direct primary care. So we were the only ones in the office. We didn't really have a ton of folks that were working with us, so we did quite a bit of the blood draw. And because I was the younger of the two of us, my dad said that I was the one that got to do it. So I did most of the blood draws in our office, which gave me a lot of perspective on how to do it. But it's also something that we do on a much grander scale throughout our training. When I was a resident, we used to do things called central lines, especially the subclavian central lines. And those are done entirely from anatomical structure. This was before bedside ultrasound was commonplace. We would have to know what the anatomy was and just blindly stick. And that's putting in a 30 centimeter catheter.
And I used to tell patients all the time, if I can put a 30 centimeter catheter into a vein that's about the size of your pinky finger without knowing where it is, I can absolutely stick a tiny little rubbery vein on your arm when I can feel it.

**Tom Merritt** (3:07)
Yeah, so suffice to say lots of experience in how to do this. And also what the hassle is, is that the right word for it?

**Gerry Tolbert** (3:18)
It's an adequate word for it. There are a lot of nuance, there's a lot of nuance to drawing blood, because there are gonna be people that have done it for a very long time and they understand how to feel, how to look.
The most promising visualization when it comes to veins happened when we got a lot better access to bedside ultrasound and near infrared technologies. And so from that standpoint, over the last 10 years, we've gotten lots and lots better at helping even new people get better at drawing blood. But there's no real substitute for experience.

**Tom Merritt** (3:51)
Yeah. And I don't get the sense it's something too many people are excited to do.

**Gerry Tolbert** (3:59)
As a patient? Yeah, absolutely.

**Tom Merritt** (4:01)
Yeah, exactly. So if we can make it faster, then that is better. Let's talk a little bit about the Aleta.