However a result that is wrong, but looks correct does not set off any alarm bells. You'd better hope that the physician requested a battery of tests and in correlating the results, sees the outlier. Otherwise you're potentially screwed.
In running tests on actual people, saving money comes far behind the overriding concerns around quality of results.
What prompted my comment was, "While most of the results were similar for the three labs, 12.2 percent of the measurements reported by Theranos were outside the expected normal range for healthy people, compared with 7.5 percent for Quest and 8.3 percent for LabCorp."
To me that sounds like at least some of the tests may be erring towards false positives. More research needed.
One classic example is a pregnancy test. You're going to find out eventually, and the impact of a false positive is huge, so the test errs toward false negatives instead of false positives.
This video does a good job explaining it (and is where I learned most of what I know): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF1T7KzRnrs
Well yes, I wasn't suggesting jumping into treatment before verifying with the expensive, higher specificity test.
Even with pregnancy, the impact of a false positive isn't huge when the next step is just to take another test - the same test that would've been done anyway if the first one wasn't available.
Though the potential savings probably aren't great with pregnancy tests because they're already cheap, and I'd imagine the overall incidence for people taking the test is pretty high.