Because of their work healthcare is better today than it was 10 years ago and the future is brighter for all of us. In San Diego California a haven for biotech start-ups, meet the founders of Biosite. Kim Blickenstaff is CEO. Dr. Ken Buechler is President and Chief Scientific Officer. And Dr. Gunars Valkirs is Senior Vice President for Biosite Discovery. Let's go inside.

KIM BLICKENSTAFF: Well let me tell you what it's like to have 10 out of 10 Harvard MBAs that look to your business plan and say it's a stupid idea. I mean that gets to be tough. I mean they do their own checks with their own clinician's that they talk to. They talk to people that have been in the industry that you're in. A lot of market leaders view new product approaches as being stupid because it's new and innovative and that's not what they're doing.

GUNARS VALKIRS: I think what we did right was we identified the first product opportunity correctly when even some of the experts in the drug-testing field said this market does not exist; there's no demand for this test in the hospital, and we're talking about the CEO of a company that was the leading drug testing company in the world said there's no market for this product.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) While the competitors stick with bulky machines that need a lab technician to run, Biosite's products are portable and simple to use. The competition is not able to deliver a result at night or over the weekend when the lab is closed, and Biosite's products can give the clinician test results 24/7 in 15 minutes.

KEN BUECHLER: Well it actually occurred to us in about 1988, 1987 that there was a need for a rapid diagnostic at that time for drugs of abuse. And obviously patient's come into emergency rooms suffering from drug overdose of any kind of drug, prescription or nonprescription drugs, and that patient needs help immediately because the patient could be overdosing.

GUNARS: We believe there was a market for it because we had tested the market and people said that they needed a test like this, so it was completely the opposite of what one of the thought leaders thought.

HATTIE: Why do you think your industry has been so stuck?

KEN: I think it's been stuck because of this so-called installed base. And what the installed base is in our industry are big laboratory analyzers that measure one protein at time. And what we recognize, part of our innovations is the ability to measure more than one protein at a time. And the reason that's important is because the diseases that people actually have that need to be diagnosed, for example, heart attacks or acute myocardial infarctions, these diseases have different ideologies. And because they have different ideologies they also change as a function of time. And as they change the protein markers profile also changes in the blood. So this means then that if one measures more than one protein at a time you'll really get a much better idea of what the patient may be suffering from.

GUNARS: The large diagnostic companies have evolved their technology platforms to the point where the only thing they focus on is making a machine bigger and faster so that the results can be delivered cheaper. They're not delivering a different result, it's the same result they delivered 30 years ago, they're trying to deliver it a little bit cheaper, and by a little bit I mean $2.50 instead of $3. That's a big deal in the diagnostics business. But if you look at the overall cost of healthcare, the 50 cents they're saving there is lost because they spent $5,000 extra on the patient because they misdiagnosed the patient, sent them to the wrong level of care and the patient spent three days in the ICU or some other ward when they could have been sent home. And vice versa they sent somebody else home that died because they should've been in the hospital.

HATTIE: Right.

GUNARS: And that's what we've done. We've basically packaged with this robotic instrument does into a very simple plastic device. And it's a technological advance. But in the case of acute illness where the result is necessary in a rapid timeframe to make decisions, that's really where our technology shines.

Unidentified employee: The test is really simple. It requires a drop, literally, a drop of blood to be placed on a plastic cartridge. And then it sits there for 15 minutes and then you put it into a reader. You get a number and that is it.