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Building a Healthcare OS, A Conversation with Ardy Arianpour, CEO at SEQSTER
83 Plays1 year ago
Healthcare data as we know it today is siloed. Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of SEQSTER, joins Frederic Laurier at Alantra to discuss data refinement, standardization, and tokenization to pull various data sources into one place, how a digital front door impacts clinical trial dropout rates, and opportunities to incorporate other sources of medical data in the future.
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Transcript
Introduction to Aardhi Aryanpour and Seekster
00:00:06
Speaker
Hi, I'm Fred Lawyer with Allantra. I head up the firm's digital health investment banking practice. On today's episode of Crossroads by Allantra, we have Aardhi Aryanpour, CEO and co-founder of Seekster. Seekster has created an application that gives consumers access to their health data by connecting various clinical data sets and unifying them into a single record. Aardhi, did I get all of that right? Fred, thanks so much for reaching out. A pleasure to be on your wonderful podcast.
Seekster's Mission: Centralizing Health Data
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, you got that right. We've been able to progress so much since we founded the company in 2016. We founded the company on the premise of putting the patient at the center of healthcare to disrupt data silos and bringing together EMR data, genomics data, claims data, medical device data, and creating that longitudinal health record.
00:01:00
Speaker
now with our partners over the past couple years and our commercial deals that we've had we've really transitioned into an operating system for health care. Interesting you also know in the industry for your marketing acumen and dressing style i trade shows it's not uncommon see you with your distinctive green seeks your t shirt and your matching converse shoes are you wearing them today.
00:01:22
Speaker
I am wearing them. As you can see, I got, well, some new Seekster swag. I got my Seekster hoodie. And on the back, if you can see what it says, it's Seek Health Data. And then I got, you know, my cool hat. And on the back of the hat, it says Seek Health Data. And the Converse shoes at home, it just really depends who I'm talking to. If I'm talking to someone of your stature, of course I'm putting them on.
00:01:47
Speaker
Love it.
Founding Story of Seekster
00:01:48
Speaker
Before you founded Seekster, you actually held various commercial positions within the pharma industry. You spent a number of years at Ambry, if I'm not mistaken. Where did you meet your two co-founders, Dana and Sean? Was that at Ambry? Yeah, so actually, no. Dana, I met at Whole Foods.
00:02:05
Speaker
And that could be a whole story on its own. Our big anniversary of meeting at Whole Foods back in 2006 should be coming up soon. So maybe you guys will see a post about that soon. But I met Dana at Whole Foods holding his trek bicycle because he's a big cyclist and we happen to be
00:02:24
Speaker
in biotech at a coincidence and from there kind of struck friendship and we're always both wanting to start up so when i thought of six years the first person i called which on this is our third company and i actually hired shawn when i was at amber to run our bio informatics division when amber was just a really really small company.
00:02:48
Speaker
I was employee number 19 at Ambry and took that company to over a thousand folks and then sold that company to Conica for a billion. And that's where we got our stars and scars. What was the impetus for founding Seagster? Was there a Eureka moment for the three of you?
The Need for Unified Health Data
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah. So the Eureka moment came from the inception of having all your health data in one place. And I didn't have all the expertise.
00:03:14
Speaker
And so I brought on the two co-founders because they had distinct expertise in data science and also in precision medicine. And data science, Sean being probably one of five people out of the United States, I would say they can do.
00:03:30
Speaker
the crazy engineering that no one can. Dana had a vast experience of 25 years plus within precision medicine and working with pharmaceutical companies. He came from habit labs and he understood the pharma world and outsourcing world really well. And once we got together, we accidentally fell on interoperability.
00:03:55
Speaker
We just wanted to create a startup that could connect all the dots of health data. And our lawyers that invested in our seed round are from Paul Hastings. And they did actually the deal for Mint.com.
00:04:10
Speaker
And once we found that out, we started studying mint.com for finances. And then we noticed, wow, there isn't anything like that in healthcare. And so we took a FinTech approach and pivoted very quickly when we came out with our direct to consumer products. I remember you used to call yourselves kind of the mint.com of healthcare, right? To make it easy for everyone to understand what you're all about.
Seekster's Interoperability System
00:04:35
Speaker
Last time we spoke, Artie, you mentioned Sexture is beyond fire.
00:04:40
Speaker
Can you please elaborate for the benefits of her listeners? You may be aware that we had OneUp Health on the show a couple of weeks back where Joe Gagnon talked in length about fire and what it means for the industry in general.
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, look, fire is awesome. We have all the fire connectors integrated and built. And when Takeda made an investment, that was the first thing that we did. However, Seekster is beyond fast healthcare interoperability resources because we built, like I said, an operating system
00:05:14
Speaker
that gets white labeled as a digital front door for enterprises, whether that's payers, providers, or pharma companies, the three P's as I call them, they launch their
00:05:30
Speaker
businesses or patient registries or whatever their use cases may be powered by Seekster. And it's a churn key SaaS solution that has fireful integration within that operating system and multiple different retrievers now to collect real world data. And so we're able to bring
00:05:55
Speaker
a longitudinal health record together and stitch records together by bringing fire and non-fire data and what I call the convergence of data
00:06:07
Speaker
in one place. Sensitively around clinical data sharing is still very much of a hut button these days. But nonetheless, unifying the patient record is a very powerful thing. With the right safeguards in place, I'm guessing it can be extremely useful for clinician and scientists that are working on new therapies. Can you in a nutshell summarize the steps required to combine those data sources? And can you also talk a bit
00:06:32
Speaker
about tokenized patient data. There's a bit of chatter around that. Can you tell us what it actually means and what it actually does? Yeah, absolutely. Let's tackle the first thing that you stated, Fred.
Data Unification and Security Measures
00:06:45
Speaker
When we started Seekster, we had to standardize and harmonize every single ICD-9
00:06:52
Speaker
ICD-10, SNOMED, RxNorm code. And how we did that is we built a data refinery on the backend so that once the collection of data occurs,
00:07:08
Speaker
We built a auto sync feature where it automatically brings together the data from an Epic and all scripts, a McKesson, a Meditech. We have 28 various EMRs fully integrated on the backend. And it's really dirty engineering.
00:07:29
Speaker
And it's why a lot of tech companies are interested in talking to us. It's why a lot of payers are interested in talking to us. And the reason why pharma came to us to invest in the beginning was because we had this data refinery built.
00:07:47
Speaker
With our partners, we even expanded the capabilities on the back end so that it has nationwide patient-centric interoperability accesses, we call it. And for the tokenization, we're Switzerland. So it doesn't matter if you're interested in DataVant tokenization, or Ichevious tokenization, or PRA Life Sciences Sonoma tokenization, we have all of them integrated.
00:08:17
Speaker
But because we are an operating system for health care, as I mentioned, the customer, the enterprise, gets the pitch
00:08:26
Speaker
what type of tokenization they want layered in to their platform, which is powered by the Seekster OS. That's how it works. What are the real world impacts or maybe we should say not having all data sources in one place. Can you give us an example? I mean, in terms of lives, potentially saved, dollars saved, what
Global Reach and Collaborations
00:08:49
Speaker
does that look like for Kaiser, for instance?
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, very good question. So we're working with a lot of entities. Obviously, we have 99.56% coverage of the digital health records in the United States. But even outside of the United States, we are working with
00:09:09
Speaker
the NHS, and we're working with other various different entities that are interested in having an interoperability engine for their patients, for their use cases. A lot of our use cases, obviously, because of the investment from pharma has been around patient registries and how we can power that for pharma companies and connect the dots for the provider or pay buyer
00:09:37
Speaker
and pharma and provider models? It's global. I promise I'll check it out once we're done. I haven't done so just yet. Also discussing another value out of what you refer to as your digital front door. If I'm not mistaken, you give patients total visibility into their clinical trials if they decide to enroll in one.
00:10:02
Speaker
Is that correct first and foremost? That's correct.
Enhancing Clinical Trials with Patient Engagement
00:10:05
Speaker
That's where we built the digital front door. And a lot of people in health care think about the digital front door for providers where you do scheduling and a bunch of stuff. So imagine that, but for clinical trials, it's amazing innovation. And we built this with, you know, hundreds of pharma innovators, pharma physicians, pharma scientists,
00:10:30
Speaker
and patients that told us how they want that digital front door to be released. We have partnerships in place with some of the top global pharma and Boeing or Ingleheim being an example of our latest deal. We signed a three-year deal to bring patient-centric
00:10:49
Speaker
interoperability and patient-centric trials for them, for their decentralized trials and powering their real world evidence studies with our real world data operating system. But they deployed it as a white label and the digital front door allows onboarding, patient engagements, communication, visualization of data, sharing of data, a lot underneath the hood there.
00:11:18
Speaker
And patients dropping out of clinical trials is a major issue. I mean, you mentioned some vital roles that you play. Do you help also with the consent form? Often it's the crucial step. That's the step where a patient will decide not to go forward to the trial. How do you help with that and getting them over that hump? Yeah, really good point there.
E-Consent and Data Privacy
00:11:41
Speaker
We spent a lot of time working with both patients and caregivers
00:11:46
Speaker
developing the right e-consent form. So one, it's trusted. Two, it's private. Three, it's secure. And four, it delivers on
00:12:00
Speaker
how a patient would actually share whatever consented data they want. Through our digital front door that we launched for our pharma partners, our payer partners, our provider partners, the patients, the participants within the trials can actually select to just share their Dexcom medical device data.
00:12:25
Speaker
or their allergies data or their lab results data. Depending on the trial, whatever the patients feel comfortable with, they can actually consent to share with at the beginning of onboarding. We built a customizable approach where any enterprise
00:12:45
Speaker
can launch this within 72 hours. It takes us 72 hours to stand up an instance fully white labeled for both patients, researchers, trials, and the enterprise. And consumers are more and more inclined to use genetic testing services like 23andMe and Ancestry DNA.
00:13:08
Speaker
Do you have any integrations with those consumer genetic testing services?
Integration with Genomic Testing
00:13:12
Speaker
It's funny that you ask that. This is my 55th podcast around healthcare, health tech, data, the digital health junkie that we both are and we all are. That's why we do these podcasts.
00:13:26
Speaker
it's interesting that more and more people are asking about our genomics expertise. And our company and myself built a couple mammoth genomic companies before. And so hence the name Seekster, because SEQ was for DNA sequencing, and STIR was for all the other data. That's how I actually came up with the name. But we actually have access to
00:13:53
Speaker
over 50 million genotyping, exome, whole genome, whether it be research grade or clinical grade or consumer genetics or clinical diagnostic tests across the world.
00:14:10
Speaker
not just across the country. And I want to actually enlighten your audience about one thing. So genomic data is actually interoperable. That's why we started Sexture back in 2016. We thought it was going to be so easy. We thought it was going to be a walk in the park because it was ATCG base pairs
00:14:30
Speaker
It doesn't matter if it comes off an Illumina sequencer, a life tech sequencer, or a thermo sequencer, or a Oxford nanopore sequencer. It doesn't matter. Always the same four. Yeah, genome data is the same. And so our bread and butter was genomics data until we accidentally fell on the interoperability of medical data, health care data.
00:14:56
Speaker
Without divulging secret information or sensitive information, can you talk about what's on the roadmap for Sextr in terms of future data source integrations?
Expanding Data Sources for Patient-Centered Care
00:15:07
Speaker
What's missing and what will it mean for your patients and your customers? Yeah, what I can share publicly is we've gone the distance as far as we can within medical, genomic, and I would say the device data.
00:15:24
Speaker
There are a lot of new avenues coming in with innovations around products that we never thought would
00:15:35
Speaker
need to be connected within a Seekster operating system. And that could be a brand new remote patient monitoring device. That could be a brand new wearable. That could be a brand new VR headsets. There's lots of data that's going to be generated well beyond just medical data. And so we're not just stopping at
00:16:01
Speaker
where medical data is at. We're very interested in claims data and how we mix the claims data with the medical data. And we have some very large entities that are coming towards us in that sense because they see the power of our operating system for patients and how it's really patient centered.
00:16:23
Speaker
Can't wait to see the press releases come out already. A couple of questions and that will let you go. You've been extremely generous with your time already. So two last questions if you don't mind. On your website, you mentioned that your platform or your operating systems, maybe it's a better way to put it, comes with pre-built access to 150,000 hospitals and medical group.
00:16:46
Speaker
That sounds to me like a pretty unique asset. What does it mean from a clinical standpoint? Can you share a few examples on how pharma and payers are leveraging that network? Yeah, a great example of that is actually looking at the patient example.
Showcasing Rapid Data Integration
00:17:02
Speaker
If you look at the tweet from the famous Dr. Eric Topol from August of 2018,
00:17:11
Speaker
He tweets and says, first time I'm able to connect all my health data from 1985 to present with four different health systems, University of Michigan, Scripps, and the other ones that he added, plus his Fitbit and his 23andMe and a bunch of other data. His MyFitnessPal nutrition data in about 24 hours.
00:17:37
Speaker
So it's not just our vast network now. We're able to bring that data together in 24 milliseconds now. It's the speed of data. Our algorithms have gotten so fast and our statistical learning tools that we built on the back end on the engineering side have really improved over the last seven and a half years of building Seekster because we know exactly how to recognize
00:18:02
Speaker
ingest and standardize the data. And so the 150,000 plus number just comes from the nation's providers that we're fully integrated with. We can have any patient around the world that has those providers connect and collect their data within a matter of milliseconds to seconds to not longer than minutes.
00:18:29
Speaker
quite the technical fee. So the last question, also on your website, you mentioned or it is mentioned that you work with specialty pharmacies.
Medication Data Integration in Trials
00:18:39
Speaker
How do they enable or how does it enable precision medicine and personalized treatment? Also, can you discuss quickly what the collection of social determinant contribute to this effort? Yeah. So pharmacy data is really important and that's a whole other avenue where we have
00:18:56
Speaker
some very large pharmacy chains that are interested in trials, they see the big pain points of if they want to make their corner street pharmacies into sites for recruitment, let's say hitting on the underserved populations, getting diverse data, they need an operating system that allows that collection of data.
00:19:22
Speaker
And so there's some exciting things that are happening behind the scenes with pharmacy chains and seek stir let's see where it goes that's all i can share there on that point however we do get through our provider network.
00:19:40
Speaker
every single medication that you're on and what you're off. And that also has a lot of value when you're thinking about Walgreens, Walmart, CDS, the big pharmacy chains, because they don't have that data. So we can bring data that is on the medication side to the pharmacy chains and really mix things up within the clinical trial setting.
00:20:08
Speaker
Hey, Artie. It's always a pleasure speaking with you. Today, because we had more time than we usually do, it was great to do a deeper dive on some of those topics. Your founding story is certainly catchy. For those of you interested in the Whole Foods story, please do watch out for that anniversary post. It should be coming out anytime now.
00:20:28
Speaker
It's not every day that we get to talk to a serial entrepreneur and is successful at that, like yourself, Artie. I think you brought us some fresh perspective on the digital front door and the efforts behind building one. It's exactly what you said. We see Dr. Clinton dashboards all the time, but we very rarely see a comprehensive dashboard for patients. As bland as it may sound, that enables patient engagement content,
00:20:55
Speaker
adherence, and retention. Obviously, that cannot be done without your vast connection, interoperability with EMRs and other healthcare systems. These data sources all in one that has value. I thank you again for your time and we look forward to our next discussion. If you'd like to hear more about Alantra's perspectives on other specific digital health topics, please subscribe to the podcast and feel free to reach out to us at any time.
00:21:23
Speaker
Thank you so much, Fred. Look forward to seeing you as always and hopefully we can have a cocktail. Cheers.