Gregg Masters 00:08
Welcome to this special edition of PopHealth Week recorded live in the HealthcareNOW Radio studio at HIMSS 2021, in Las Vegas. PopHealth Week is brought to you by Health Innovation Media. Health Innovation Media brings your brand narrative alive via original or value-added digitally curated content for omnichannel distribution and engagement. Connect with us at www.popupstudio.productions. And welcome everyone to this special edition of PopHealth Week at HIMSS 2021 in Las Vegas, recording live at HealthcareNOW Radios studio here in 3700 won’t mean much on the podcast. But that’s where we are. And my guest today, flying solo, Fred’s on a break. My guest today is Ardy Arianpour he is a co-founder and CEO of a company called Seqster. He’s a fellow San Diegan I’ve been chasing him now at a number of conferences trying to get them in front of the mic. And today we finally succeeded. So Andy Welcome to the show.
Ardy Arianpour 01:14
Gregg, it’s such a pleasure being here today in Las Vegas at HealthcareNOW Radio with you. We’ve been trying to do this for a while. And thanks so much for your persistence. And it looks like this time I got you.
Gregg Masters 01:26
Absolutely. Well, hey, I’m glad it worked out. So love your shirt. Before we get into your company Seqster to tell us a little bit about you your personal journey and why you’re sitting in the seat you’re in here as well as what you’re doing at Seqster.
Ardy Arianpour 01:41
Yeah, look, it’s just been an incredible entrepreneurial journey. Ever since I stepped foot I think in the United States at the age of six. I moved to the US when I was six years old learning English when I was nine always been an underdog. And, you know, I was passionate about blending science with business at a very young age I became a biotech executive in my early 20s built a billion-dollar company, actually, by the age of 35. And I spent 15 years in clinical diagnostics, trailblazing DNA sequencing technologies. Before I started, actually Seqster and the name Seqster to actually comes from my DNA sequencing background, I wanted to combine DNA sequencing data with all your medical data. Somehow through that journey. I fell on interoperability. And I actually hadn’t gone to HIMSS ever till 2017. When I went to HIMSS in 2017. For the first time I realized, oh my god, I’m coming from the genomics world, to this health IT world. What’s going on with all this, you know, data being siloed. And so we always wanted to create a system, and a technology that puts the person at the center of their health care, disrupting all their medical data, EMR data, bringing together their genetic baseline data, as well as their wearable data, and now adding their pharmacy data, prescription data, claims data in a 360 patient view. We have achieved nationwide scale 100% access on all medical data. And we filed the first patents on a multigenerational health record back in 2016. Where now everyone, whether it is at HIMSS or any other healthcare conference, whether it’s virtual and now getting back to hopefully a better life of coming face to face conferences. I’m everyone’s seeking health data. So I’ve always believed that everyone’s a seeker. It doesn’t matter if you’re a provider, a payer, a pharmaceutical company, a clinical trial company, a CRO or even you know, a person, a patient, a parent, we’re all seeking health data. That’s why I founded Seqster.
Gregg Masters 04:10
excellent. So for those who may not phonetically translate into the Google search on the company, Can you spell it for us?
Ardy Arianpour 04:17
Yes, it’s S is in sam E is an Emily Q as in question S as in sam T as in Tom. E is an Emily R as in Robert that’s Seqster and you can find out more on Seqster.com
Gregg Masters 04:32
There you go. And similar Twitter handle I assume yes at
Ardy Arianpour 04:35
Seqster and on LinkedIn the same.
Gregg Masters 04:39
Okay. And how about you have a Twitter account I assume.
Ardy Arianpour 04:42
I don’t have a personal Twitter account but I have a personal LinkedIn account and you can connect with me at Ardy Arianpour that’s A R D Y Arianpour A R I A N P O U R on LinkedIn and happy to talk to anyone that wants to talk about health, digital health, health, data health. Tech, solving big problems in the world.
Gregg Masters 05:02
Okay, so I’m on your website, meet our team, I see two of your co-founders Seqster is, the mission statement, I would assume, Seqster was founded on the vision of a world where individuals own and truly understand all of their health data. We believe that combining multiple data types each such as electronic health records, genetic and fitness apps in one secure place is the key to unlocking optimal health and wealth. So how are we doing there?
Ardy Arianpour 05:35
Yeah, look, I think health care’s number one problem. There’s no bigger problem than interoperability. And, you know, we used to talk about interoperability, but now it’s really front and center. Let’s take COVID, for example. COVID is not a it is a political problem. Now, I guess you could say, with people not getting vaccinated. But it is a data problem. It’s a data tracing problem. It’s an interoperability problem. Because when you get a vaccine, or if you get, you know, certain testing done, that data gets siloed. And it does not actually, you know, get combined with all your other data, our technology allows the patient to actually bring all that data through HIPAA, you own your data. And now with CMS ONC, interoperability final rulings that, you know, passed with the 21st Century Cures Act, payers and providers are scrambling here. Every talk I’ve gone to every meeting, I’ve gone to meeting with top payers and providers here at HIMSS, 21. The discussion has been how do we bring data together for our members, for our users, by them? And how do we actually allow them to consent to share that data? We created that enterprise technology for people to do that at scale?
Gregg Masters 06:55
So characterize the food chain, if you will, and locate Seqster in terms of that continuum?
Ardy Arianpour 07:04
Yeah. So I think there’s that you have the EMR companies, right. You got the wearable companies, you got the lab testing companies, you got the genomic companies doing sequencing. They’re all siloing data, right? Think of us as the glue that connects everything together. So everyone was really excited when Blue Button came out. And I don’t know, I’m sure your audience knows. But I don’t know if you know, but Blue Button actually kind of sucks. The reason why it sucks is because it’s very limited. People are all talking about FIHR, right? Fast healthcare interoperability resources, we had FIHR fully integrated three years ago, it’s only about 5, 6, 7 percent of the data. It’s the fact that how do you actually get complete coverage we created, you know, the pipes for the nation, so that Gregg can request any data source. And in milliseconds, to minutes, depending on how many providers you have, how many wearables you have, and how much other data you have, with any data that’s being siloed, your able to bring that in, by your request. We don’t own the data, you own the data. And if you go back to my blue button, we’ve created the green button. Way more powerful.
Gregg Masters 08:25
Tell me about the green button.
Ardy Arianpour 08:26
Green button is Seqster, we seek out health data upon the request of the individual. And one of the first people to actually do that was Dr. Eric Topol in 2018, when he also didn’t believe we could do what we did, but he called me in personally in his office, and he wanted to, you know, have an experience. So we get an invite code. And I’ll show this to you. You can see Dr. Eric Topol first time, I’ve been able to get my medical data from 1985 to present for health systems at Scripps health at UCSD at Cleveland Clinic clinic at the University of Michigan plus my 23 and Me plus my Fitbit plus My Fitness Pal, with labs from different systems connected through Seqster trying it for less than 24 hours step in the right direction. Now look at this. Look at the date on that. Why don’t you tell the audience what the date is?
Gregg Masters 09:22
Yeah, it’s August 21, 2018.
Ardy Arianpour 09:25
Three years ago, we solved this problem. No one wanted to talk to us. Now everyone wants to talk to us. Now they believe that we actually had the right vision. But we executed our team gets all the credits. I have 45 amazing engineers that know interoperability better than anyone in this building. And we have solved health care’s biggest problem. And I couldn’t be more proud to tell this story on HealthcareNOW Radio, because this is where it happens.
Gregg Masters 09:58
There you go and What, uh, if you’re gonna get a shout out from anyone, Eric Topol is about as the top of the line. And as another San Diego compadre, a shout out to him. He’s, he’s just amazing. So that’s, that’s great. So I think I heard either pipes or plumbing. So is it? Is it solely sort of physical pipe kind of vision and or? Or is there more to it
Ardy Arianpour 10:25
There is more to it because it’s not just about data. So we started out with piping, right and plumbing the nation on any data source, whether that’s a small doctor’s office, a small clinic in, you know, Arkansas, that’s run by a random EMR that’s not on an you know, Cerner Allscripts or Epic, or, you know, one of the big ones. And after we executed on that, we went towards patient engagements. So we’ve actually built now, since we’re backed by Takeda pharma, we’re also backed by 23 and Mes, Anne Wojcicki, which is, you know, number one female entrepreneur, we’re so lucky to have her as an investor in Seqster, as well as Omni Health Holdings, which were a group that sold to United Healthcare group, their company, Omniclaim that became part of that Equion. So we have, you know, payer investors, we got genomic investors, we got pharma investors. And what’s really interesting about our folks that invested in Seqster , in our recent Series A that we did in January, was the fact that if you look at the vision that I put out, in 2016, it was, you know, EMR data, genomic data, wearable data, right. And we got three different types of investors. And most companies don’t get that our technology is foundational for interoperability. And so that’s why we can attract multiple different types of customers, we have, you know, dozen customers right now, paying for our SaaS solution. And we couldn’t be more proud of the diversity of our customers, actually, because we learn about so many different use cases, and value props, whether that’s in concierge medical practices, or just decentralized trials, or if it’s for member engagements for payers that want to boost their net promoter scores. I feel like this journey at Seqster personally, for myself, I’ve been able to take a look at healthcare from angles that most people have not. And that’s only thanks to Seqster, because everyone wants to talk to us about how we can enable their customers their business.
Gregg Masters 12:52
So I’ll just call them channels, but of those three sources, EMR genetics, wearables, etc. What’s the proportionality of inflows right now through Seqster?
Ardy Arianpour 13:05
Its use case-dependent. So if we’re talking about a clinical trial, and we’re talking about, you know, a rare disease study that we’re leading, then it’s 50% medical data, 50%. genomic data, clinical diagnostic data, no wearable data, because rare disease, families don’t have that data. And it’s not fitting for the use case. Can they add it in there? Sure. It’s available, but it’s it’s not a fit for that specific use case. If we’re talking about a payer use case, it’s actually the claims data with the EMR data. And that’s split about 70/30. Right. So it’s all use case dependent. You see
Gregg Masters 13:47
the user-generated content from Fitbit, Apple Watch, and so forth growing as a proportion of influence.
Ardy Arianpour 13:55
Absolutely. So here’s what’s really interesting, I’m wearing my Apple watch right now. If you have a Fitbit, and you have an Apple Watch, which a lot of people do, because they had a Fitbit before and then Google bought them, they became Google Fit. And you know, now I don’t know for Christmas or something you got, you know, an Apple watch or something. What happens is, one says biking, the other says cycling, but our system can connect both Apple Watch data, and the Fitbit data and the Garmin data and any other wearable data. And then we can stitch records together, not just on the medical side, or the genomic side, but we can do this on the wearable sensor, medical device side and create an instantaneous longitudinal health record. That’s what we really do. What Seqster does really well, it can create a longitudinal health record for Gregg Master and his family. It can create a longitudinal health record for the 50,000 attendees that were supposed to be here at HIMSS. It’s a little bit less Because of COVID times, I think, but it’s still been a fantastic conference. But, you know, it’s the scale that we can do this at Eric Topol’s tweet in 2018 is a perfect example. Wherein, you know, we were able to do it in about 24 hours, but our algorithms, and the programming has gotten so sophisticated, and, and fast that we do it in milliseconds, to up to minutes. If you’re a cancer patient, and you have a lot of data, we can even pull in imaging data, daikon data, we’re not limited to any type of data, Gregg, to pull in. And this is what is really important for the audience, and the listeners to understand and if anyone’s looking for this sort of solution, you know, you can contact us at BD at Seqster .com. And our business development team can set up a time and demo so that you can actually try it, because seeing is believing. But trying it is just you’re ready to execute something.
Gregg Masters 15:57
So talk about give us a thumbnail of your principal target as far as customer who do you really directing the message to?
Ardy Arianpour 16:06
Yeah, so we’re B to B to C. But what we did where I think we cracked innovation, better than anyone out there was we started with the patient. And I never allowed our team to step aside from that center, we put the patient at the center so they can smash all the data silos. And that is so powerful. I can’t tell you how powerful it is. My father, who’s a colon cancer survivor of recent, my team used our platform to save his life. We ran a tumor board in six hours with all his data and got it to Kaiser got him in the surgery. He dodged the bullet celebrated his 70th birthday before the lockdown happened last year in Nice, and he’s alive and kicking. Turning 72 this September.
Gregg Masters 17:05
Fascinating story. So if you’re just tuning in, you’re listening to a special edition of PopHealth Week recorded live in the studio of HealthcareNOW Radio at HIMSS 2021. In Las Vegas, and our guest is Ardy Arianpour, who is a co-founder and CEO of a company called Seqster. So Ardy What’s next? I mean, where do you see the the glide trajectory taking you? And what does it look like in terms of channel partners and potential collaborators?
Ardy Arianpour 17:36
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of consolidation happening actually in the overall healthcare data ecosystem. Right? You just saw that Datavance and Psyop did a $7 billion merger. Right? You saw that, um, you know, Amwell is in telemedicine purchasing lots of different companies. There’s a lot of consolidation happening. And we’ve gotten a lot of calls, but I built this company to really impact lives. I don’t want our technology to be siloed with the wrong corporation. And we’ve been really firm on that. We’ve been doing this for a long time, Gregg, since January 4, when I founded the company 2016. Right before JP Morgan Healthcare conference running around San Francisco trying to get people to invest in the company. It took years to get attention. I owe a big thanks, actually, to be honest with you to Bill Gates, when he called me up personally to meet because we are working on Alzheimer’s disease use cases because my maternal and paternal bloodlines were affected by Alzheimer’s, both my grandmother’s on my mom and dad side passed away. And that’s how I came up with the multi-generational health record. And then Bill through his, you know, philanthropy found out that we are working on some interoperability things with caregiver stuff and Alzheimer’s. And then we are able to get connected to Boston University. And then we built the Seqster research portal and then from there, that’s when pharma really noticed us and we started thinking outside of any disease, six years for any disease, it’s for a healthy person, it’s for a person that got a COVID test. It’s for a rare disease child, it’s for a parent that’s caring for their, you know, loved ones across the country. It’s for a payer that wants to deploy it to their members to you know, boost their net promoter score and get 50 million lives on the platform. This is what’s so interesting. What I’m seeing is that there is immense opportunity, not just because we have solved health care’s number one biggest problem, but this problem is not going to go away. Interoperability is worse than cancer. Just in this conversation of 20 minutes that we’ve been on how much data has been siloed, think about that for a second. Take a step back and think how much data has been siloed How many people have gone to the hospital? How many accidents have happened? How many COVID tests have happened? How many, you know, folks have gotten a genetic test? How many other folks have, you know, gotten some kind of telemedicine visits? And then, you know, all that data just gets siloed. And so longitudinal data, I know. And I see being the most important thing. And if you’re looking to, you know, bring innovation, if you’re looking to change healthcare for real, because I always say there’s no care in health care, healthcare sucks. It really does. It doesn’t matter where you are, it really sucks, or else we wouldn’t be in this pandemic situation, if it didn’t suck. It’s because we are not really thinking big. We need more people thinking very big, and wanting to execute. And it’s not always with the big companies.
Gregg Masters 20:54
There. There you go. I mean, we don’t have a health care system. We have a sick care non-system siloed, mostly, as you’ve noted earlier, so why don’t you take a minute and just maybe talk a little bit about any headwinds, tailwinds, where do you see growth,
Ardy Arianpour 21:12
I think, you know, one of the biggest tailwinds when we, when we founded Seqster in 2016, we never thought Seqster was going to become law. We worked hand in hand with CMS and ONC. Ever since 2018. And Seqster, was actually used as a concept to draft those rules that dropped on March 9 in 2020, last year, and then it was delayed due to you know, COVID. And then now, they came into effect for payers and providers, there’s going to be a big blacklist coming out that lists providers and payers that are not CMS ONC, interoperability compliant. And for the audience to know a little bit about that. It’s basically patient access. patient access is great. But you want your patient data to be yours. you own your data, and your data is worth, you know, platinum dollars.
Gregg Masters 22:06
theoretically we do, right? But we seem to unintentionally license it informally to others in
Ardy Arianpour 22:13
Well, every time you go to the doctor’s office, you sign a consent that, you know, they get to sell your data to you know, IMS or whoever.
Gregg Masters 22:20
Right, right. So I The last time I know this is one of Eric Topol’s issues. I mean, he pointed out that I think it was New Hampshire, where there’s it may have changed since then, because this is a little dated, but no, we we don’t own our data. You know, I consider it I wrote a blog post and many years ago, it’s my IP, you know, I mean, it’s really mine. You should I should sublicense it to you on a use case by no specific use basis. But anyway, that’s a whole nother tantrum.
Ardy Arianpour 22:49
Absolutely.
Gregg Masters 22:50
All right. So before I let you go, we’ve got about four minutes left in our conversation Ardy anything you want to say before we talk about your experience here at HIMSS?
Ardy Arianpour 23:02
Yeah, look, one of the first people that understood the impact of good that Seqster did was Nick, Pink, Pink Socks, Nick Atkins, so big throw out to Nick Pink Socks. You know, we miss him here at HIMSS. And he’s just an amazing guy. He was one of the first people that understood, that, you know, we do good for the world. That’s, that’s, that’s what Seqster’s is all about. And, you know, I’m so happy to have an opportunity. I want to thank you, and the organizers of HealthcareNOW Radio, to having myself and Seqster on your wonderful program, and just really appreciate you, you know, stating all the facts and putting it out there. .
Gregg Masters 23:50
Good So, before I let you go, any takeaways since you’ve been here? What’s your experience been like?
Ardy Arianpour 23:58
Yeah, you know, HIMSS for those of you that didn’t make it to HIMSS. First off, everyone was very masked up. Obviously, you had to be vaccinated. But umm
Gregg Masters 24:08
pretty tight process.
Ardy Arianpour 24:10
Oh, yeah. I think there’s many people that I saw wearing two masks that guy right there just walking, two masks, right. I even had two masks, but I wasn’t wearing two masks all the time, because it’s just hard to breathe. But I did have a mask on the whole time except right now just talking on the radio here. I think what was nice about HIMSS this year was that you can have focused meetings longer, because there it wasn’t a zoo. It’s usually a zoo. If you haven’t been at HIMSSS come and you’ll see the zoo in Orlando in March, right. But I think I would call this a mini HIMSS. It was a mini HIMSS. And I kind of liked it. I liked the fact that you can have these focused meetings. And could there have been better talks? Sure. Could there have been you know, more activity Sure. What What was the most depressing is there weren’t events? And you know, the networking events are great. So you had to make your own networking event. But we were so busy. I think I had 37 different meetings.
Gregg Masters 25:12
Wow.
Ardy Arianpour 25:13
You’re my 38th. And we weren’t, we weren’t even planning.
Gregg Masters 25:16
You’re an energetic guy. I’m sure you handled it just fine Ardy. So wait before I’m gonna cut you off, because we want to your take on one last thing. So this is Pop Health Week. Give us a 90 second rundown on, What’s the application of the pop of the Good platform technology to those interested in the population health management space?
Ardy Arianpour 25:38
Yeah, look, population, health analytic companies specifically, are really looking for the right quality data, Good brings high fidelity, high-quality data for the population health segments. And that is so important. Because if you want to run really good analytics from pop health, you have to have the right data. The same thing like if you want to run really good AI, it doesn’t matter how great your AI engine is, it doesn’t matter how great your pop health platform is. If you don’t have the right quality data, we bring instantly, longitudinal real-time, real-world data so that pop health companies can run real-world evidence studies.
Gregg Masters 26:27
Excellent. Ardy. Our time is up. I want to thank you for stopping by today. It’s been great chatting with you. I’m glad we spontaneously hooked up. So thank you for sharing and my guest has been Ardy Arianpour. He’s the founder and CEO of a company called Seqster and look them up on the web at www. seqster.com and follow them on Twitter with the same name. So that’s it. Thanks again folks. That is the last word for today’s special edition broadcast the PopHealth Week recorded live in the HealthcareNOW Radio studio at HIMSS 2021. In Las Vegas for more information on HealthcareNOW Radios lineup of live and on demand podcasts including PopHealth Week go to www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com. And finally, if you’re enjoying our work here at PopHealth Week, please subscribe to our channel on the podcast platform of your choice and you follow us on twitter by @PopHealthWeek. Bye now.