Abbott BinaxNOW — Scaling COVID Testing
Built and led the cross-functional team that scaled Abbott's at-home COVID testing platform from pilot to 50 million tests per month.
The Challenge
When Abbott launched BinaxNOW — the first rapid, at-home COVID-19 antigen test — in August 2020, demand immediately outstripped every production and distribution forecast. Testing sites were overwhelmed and inaccessible. Millions of Americans were waiting days for PCR results that arrived too late to be actionable. The technology existed to change the equation, but the operational infrastructure to deliver it at population scale did not.
The platform that managed test distribution and result capture was still in pilot mode — built for thousands of tests, not tens of millions. Manufacturing, supply chain, regulatory compliance, eCommerce logistics, and the NAVICA digital health app all needed to work in concert, and no one was orchestrating the whole picture. That was the gap I stepped into.
Key Decisions
Building the team from scratch — I inherited a platform with no dedicated cross-functional team behind it. My first move was recruiting across manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, digital health, and regulatory — assembling the people who could collectively own the full pipeline from production line to a patient’s front door. Getting the right people in the room mattered more than any technical decision I made.
Shifting from pilot to production mindset — The pilot system made assumptions about scale that broke under real-world demand. I led the architectural and operational shift to production-grade workflows, establishing core processes for manufacturing handoffs, regulatory compliance gates, eCommerce fulfillment, digital result capture through the NAVICA app, and next-day distribution logistics. Every workflow had to be designed for throughput, not just correctness.
Daily cross-functional orchestration — With engineering, lab operations, supply chain, and app teams all moving at sprint pace, I established daily stand-ups and a shared coordination cadence that kept dependencies visible and blockers from compounding. At this scale, a one-day delay in any workstream cascaded across the entire pipeline.
Optimizing for speed without sacrificing compliance — Healthcare at scale means regulatory requirements don’t bend for urgency. I worked closely with regulatory and quality teams to build compliance into the production pipeline itself, so that scaling up didn’t mean choosing between speed and safety.
What I Delivered
Population management platform — Transformed the pilot-stage platform into a production system capable of supporting mass-market test distribution, with reliable workflows across manufacturing, logistics, and digital result capture.
Distribution program — Built the operational backbone for next-day test delivery at national scale, coordinating across eCommerce, fulfillment, and supply chain partners to keep pace with surging demand.
NAVICA app integration — Supported the launch of Abbott’s NAVICA digital health app for test result capture and verification, connecting the physical test to a digital health record that millions of Americans relied on for travel, work, and school access.
Scaled throughput to 50M tests/month — By October 2020, the platform and distribution program were operating at 50 million tests per month. In the first half of 2021, volume scaled further to 30–90 million tests, ensuring supply continuity during the critical winter surge and vaccine rollout period.
Outcomes
The work enabled Abbott to meet one of the most urgent public health demands in modern history. Reaching 50 million tests per month by October 2020 meant that rapid, at-home testing became a real option for millions of people who previously had no timely path to a result. The NAVICA app gave those results a digital footprint — connecting testing to the broader ecosystem of reopening, travel, and workplace safety.
What I carry forward from this experience is a conviction that leadership at scale is fundamentally about orchestration. The technology was straightforward. The logistics were not. Getting manufacturing, regulatory, digital health, and distribution teams to move as one system — under extreme time pressure and public scrutiny — required a kind of relentless coordination that no process framework can substitute for. You just have to show up every day and make sure nothing falls through.