UnitedHealth Group Chief Scientific Officer Ken Ehlert joins Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani and Seana Smith to discuss the new testing kit that will enable patients to test themselves for the virus at home.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. We have UnitedHealth rolling out a new coronavirus test. Now patients can administer it themselves, so it potentially reduces the risk for health care workers. And this comes as the number of worldwide cases tops 510,000.

So here to discuss, we have Ken Ehlert, a chief scientific officer for UnitedHealth. And we're also joined by Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani. [INAUDIBLE] for taking the time. We've been talking about the importance of testing here at Yahoo Finance. How does your test, the UnitedHealth [INAUDIBLE] test, help relieve some of the stress on our health care system at this time?

KEN EHLERT: Sure. You know, the COVID-19 test actually, if you think about it, has two parts. You have a collection method and then the test itself. We didn't actually deal with the test from the back end, but rather the collection method. And inside of that, what we looked at was the, you know, who actually does it, and then what part of the nose that they actually take that sample from.

So in a normal clinic, the current-- well, it's now been changed, but the FDA standard was that a clinician needed to actually administer the test. And that would cause the clinician to have to wear PPE protective gear. Because as you put that into the patient's nose, it would cause them to either sneeze or cough or vomit. And you would actually get that onto the physician or onto the nurse, whoever was actually administering the test.

By actually changing it to a self-administered test, where you're actually using a swab to actually take that yourself, the clinical staff now can actually hand that to you, allow you to actually do it in your own space there, where they can still see you, and actually allow you to do that yourself. So you're actually saving-- you're saving PPE. You're actually keeping the clinicians at a little bit of a distance to keep them safe. And it's actually a much more comfortable task for the patient themselves.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Ken, it's Anjalee. We know that the White House and the FDA have both been supportive of this idea. How does this affect, really, the rollout of testing? And will it affect supplies and shortages there?

KEN EHLERT: Well, you know, one of the key constraints in that is the components that go into the task. So you have the reagents that are there. You have the test itself. You have the swab, those types of things. And each of those have their own supply chains. And I wouldn't be able to speak to which ones got the biggest constraints at the moment.

But in terms of rolling out the task, this actually will allow us to accelerate as long as supplies can keep up. You'll get better throughput in the clinic. You're keeping people safe. You're also not expiring all your PPE at the clinic itself. So this actually should bring forward the ability to get more tests done in a location than you would normally do.

So you think about it. If you were a clinician that taking the test before, you can do one person at a time. If I actually give you the test there, I can allow a patient to quickly do that and then just hand the completed kit back to me. And you can probably-- you can do several of those in parallel.

SEANA SMITH: Ken, what about the accuracy of these? Because some of these tests that people are able to administer themselves, they've been criticized for possibly not being as accurate.

KEN EHLERT: Yeah, so there's a couple different issues going on there. So a lot of that criticism comes from-- again, this will be like two big areas where that would come from. One would be is if I don't actually collect the sample the right way. So if I just take a swab and touch it to the end of my nose, that's not going to be sufficient for picking up the virus there.

So one would be is how the test is actually administered there. And the other one would be is, is that accurate on the back side, meaning what type of technology is actually used to discern whether or not you have the virus in you, and then at what levels, those types of things.

So if you think and look at how the FDA changed their standard on this one, there still is a chain of custody of the result. So what needs to happen is a doctor needs to place the order for the test, and then it needs to take place in the presence of a clinician so they can actually determine that that collection method itself is actually happening the right way, and then using a standard test kit from that point forward.

When you look at the results of how that was done so that when we conducted the study, those patients were in front of clinicians, they were doing it themselves so we can ensure that they are still collecting it the right way, the test results on that are near equivalent of the current test [INAUDIBLE], the nasopharyngeal test, where you're actually sticking it deep inside of the patient's nose. So we're identifying over 90% of the patients that are positive. That is in line with what you would find from a current test today.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Ken Ehlert, chief scientific officer for UnitedHealth, thank you so much for joining us.