“Our priority is creating a person-centric interoperability platform”
Recommended Book:
Best Way to Contact Ardy:
info@seqster.com
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the podcast. Today I have the privilege of hosting Ardy Arianpour. He’s the CEO and co-founder at seeks there. He’s a visionary health tech executive and serial entrepreneur with 15 plus years of experience in the Big Data, genomics, biotech industry. His 40s galvanizing startup companies into successful enterprises launching disruptive products and platforms that change healthcare for the benefit of patients and consumers. Today he’s doing work at Seqster and I had had opportunity to actually take a peek behind the curtain on the software. Think of Mint for your finances. Well Seqster is the mint of your health care data and what they’re doing there is they’re aggregating information across providers no matter within the same system or different providers to actually get you all of your health data to your hands. Pretty cool stuff being done here, Seqster. We’re all seeking and already is leading that vision. So it’s a pleasure to have him on the podcast today. Aarti welcome.
Ardy Arianpour:
Thank you so much. So it’s a pleasure to be on your podcast today. Look forward to the discussion.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely Ardy. So did I leave anything out in your intro that you want to fill in?
Ardy Arianpour:
No other than you know I love barbecue.
Saul Marquez:
I love it.
Ardy Arianpour:
Any favorite style I guess burnt ends are my favorite and coming back from just south by southwest not too long ago for the extra special treat in Austin. Yeah. Burnt ends are the best.
Saul Marquez:
I love it man. I love me some barbecue too. So what got you into health care my man?
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. You know I was very fortunate to grow up in San Diego, California where you know we have such a huge life science community influence started at the Salk Institute in research on gene expression at the age of 16 actually and then realized quickly that you didn’t need to be a scientist or a doctor even though I was premed during my undergrad to figure out if you can move the needle on healthcare.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. And yeah the San Diego area is definitely bustling in medtech so you gravitated toward it and you’ve done a lot of different things man. You’re a serial entrepreneur you’ve started several different companies all in the health space. Want to hear from you what you believe is the hot topic that needs to be on health leaders agendas and how are you and seeks they’re approaching it.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah you know I think it really is now all about interoperability and what we’ve built it speaks to is a person centric interoperability platform that puts the person at the center of health care disrupting all their episodic E.H.R., baseline genetic and continuous monitoring data and let you collect own and share your data on your terms.
Saul Marquez:
Love it man. I mean you know just the opportunity to do that. It’s so clunky, everything is. It’s not easy to be able to aggregate in such an efficient way. We’d love to hear from you. Have you guys gone live with this?
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. So we’re in still for quite some time but we went live last year with several partners and currently working on some big commercialization opportunities on the providers and payers side that have been coming to us since we’ve built something of scale. Now we can really deal with some large enterprises and we’re really excited about that.
Saul Marquez:
Now that’s great. So as you as you move ahead in the work at Seqster what’s something that in your early partnerships you’ve been able to say “wow, you know we’ve improved outcomes we’ve created results through this”. Give us an example.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. You know it’s it’s really three things it’s the fact that we get the speed the time to first visit and make that visit meaningful with the right info and data whether that’s a provider or a payer. We get to improve that patient and physician experience that we’ve all been really wanting for a long time. And the result of that is outcomes data, no pun intended with your podcast – it is really hard to get and we enable outcomes data because once you have all this longitudinal, multi-dimensional and multigenerational data in one place it’s amazing what you can do with outcomes data on that.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s really good man. And so the one thing that comes to mind is the aggregation of data and a lot of times then this comes up when discussing you know how an individual could go from a scripts to you know different health system down the street. How does that work? And you know when you have two competing systems how are they going to reconcile that?
Ardy Arianpour:
So you know the problem right now is you know even if you have let’s say scripts data and it’s on an epic type of platform on the E.H.R. and then you have let’s say UCSD data and it’s also on an epic plat they’re on two different versions of epic scripts and UCSD data in the same city, one mile away from each other.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Ardy Arianpour:
They don’t talk to one another. And so that is the biggest challenge and that challenge is known as the 30 billion dollar plus problem called interoperability that everyone is now talking about. And it’s front and center. And you know we were the first company that was able to achieve nationwide scale in not just bringing scripts and UCSD data together but you know we can bring scripts UCSD Cleveland Clinic, NYU, Mt. Sinai and you know Rush Hospital in Chicago, health data together in one place.
Saul Marquez:
So you’re able to scrub it and make it make it look uniform for the sake of your platform.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. Because what we’ve done is we spent the past couple of years we and the team gets all the credit for this with a highly sophisticated engineering team that standardized and harmonized all the epic cerner Allscripts, McKesson, Practice fusion, Athenahealth, data all on the back end as well as you know the DNA data and various different continuous monitoring the wearable data.
Saul Marquez:
Love that man. And so the deadline, the government deadline to make this data available through fire it was moved. I’m sure that maybe slowed you guys down a little bit but when that does happen do you envision that’s going to be when the wheels will start to turn fast?
Ardy Arianpour:
So what’s great about Sikhs and how we’re doing it differently is that don’t depend on fire or not. We’re not saying that we’re the experts that there should be some kind of standard if fire is going to become the standard. That’s not a problem because at the end of the day again. Yeah we put the person – the patient at the center of their health care and empower them to collect their data through our technology so it doesn’t matter if it’s fire. Hl7 or any other symmeric.
Saul Marquez:
Got it, got it. Cool man, makes a lot of sense. And so give us an example Ardy, you know it’s been three years. You guys have been working on this for a while. I mean it’s cool and I mean I had had an opportunity folks to see it. It’s really neat. If this was available to me I would use it. Give us an example of something that didn’t work out a setback that you guys had and what you learned from it to make the platform even better.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. You know I think the biggest setback was the fact that we stayed in still too long and you don’t need to perfect the product to come out of stealth and we had a significant technical breakthrough two years ago but one of the really perfects the UI and the UX and the user experience and we’re working day in and day out with thousands of patients to tell us how they want it. And that’s why you know when I showed you the platform you enjoyed it so quickly because people just like yourselves told us you know what not to do. And if I had to go back I would have came out of stealth a lot earlier. We stayed in stealth way too long and I think we. That was a setback but now I guess is a product that is further along than anything out there. So in hindsight it could be arguable if you know we did the right thing being in stealth or not.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah now for sure, for sure it’s definitely something that you’ve got to balance out. But yeah so it flows. It works well I mean and even anything that you use will have glitches. I mean Mint has glitches you know and you’ve got to expect that kind of thing. So I think shipping was the right move so kudos to you and your team for getting it out.
Ardy Arianpour:
Thanks so much. Yeah. The team definitely all the credit. And you know we’ve got a relentless team that has the DNA and the mission behind this and that’s what it takes.
Saul Marquez:
What’s your proudest experience with the company thus far?
Ardy Arianpour:
That’s a really good question. You know we had a watershed moments and couldn’t be and the team couldn’t be more proud. When Dr. Eric Topol actually wanted to try the platform and when he tried it he actually tweeted it about it the next day and that’s public. You can go on our Twitter feed and its pinned. And he basically tweeted. First time I’ve been able to get my medical data from 1985 to presence four different health systems at Scripts Health, at UCSD health, at Cleveland Clinic, at University of Michigan plus my twenty three ne, plus my Fitbit, plus my fitness pal with labs from different systems all connected through Seqster to trying it less than twenty four hours step in the right direction. That was you know one of our most humble than proud moments but I could tell you that every day now there’s a moment that makes us so proud of what we’ve done. And just recently we’ve had an influx of people just like Dr. Eric Topol try the platform and have the same experience and that’s what makes us so proud is we really have cracked the code on person centric interoperability.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. What a great thing to be proud of for sure. And health care doesn’t have to be complicated folks and Seqster’s doing just that making it simple. Tell us a little bit more about an exciting project within the Seqster platform today.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah I can share two very exciting things one is with a well-known provider and stay tuned because we’ll have a very nice announcement with a provider and how we’re really going to change health care with our platform that you know I just demonstrated to you and how they’ll be able to take our technology and really speed up the time for first visit and make that visit meaningful for their patients with the right information and data because it’s so hard to collect medical records as you know. And then another example is with a very large payor that is interested in deploying our platform to some I would say ridiculous numbers in the millions. And we are working through those two examples currently.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. And the power of finally getting everything in one place is going to add huge value. And I think take a lot of cost out of healthcare so kudos to you guys in these exciting projects. This part of the podcast Ardy is a lightning round. I got a couple of questions for you followed by your favorite book. You ready?
Ardy Arianpour:
Cool. Let’s do it.
Saul Marquez:
All right. What’s the best way to improve health care outcomes?
Ardy Arianpour:
Put health data in the hands of people period.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. What is the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?
Ardy Arianpour:
Don’t just involve the medical community I think you have to involve the patients and that is key.
Saul Marquez:
How do you stay relevant as an organization despite constant change?
Ardy Arianpour:
I think you guys know this better than us. Healthcare is super complex. We stay relevant by generating novel insights with all the dark data and we shed light on that dark data. That Dark Data is the data that already exists out there on all of us.
Saul Marquez:
What’s one area of focus that drives everything at Seqster?
Ardy Arianpour:
It’s the person it’s the patient and you’ve heard me say this throughout the podcast. We put the person at the center of health care to disrupt all the data silos. Ask yourself if epic or Apple puts you at the center of your health care.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. And the two questions coming are I’m more on a personal note. What’s your number one health habit?
Ardy Arianpour:
I would say it’s definitely running. It’s not eating but I run so that I can eat all I can.
Saul Marquez:
Got to get that barbecue in right.
Ardy Arianpour:
I try I put it in 40 miles a week and.
Saul Marquez:
It’s serious.
Ardy Arianpour:
It’s serious. But you know as you get older it gets a lot harder to.
Saul Marquez:
I used to go to San Diego a lot and loved running around there. You know the bay is just gorgeous, it’s gorgeous.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah the harbor down in San Diego is the best place to run and it’s just a great environment. Friend runners.
Saul Marquez:
And the weather there is perfect. I’m jealous.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah that’s always hard whenever I go on business trips and the weather is you know five degrees or even 10 degrees colder it’s it’s a lot harder to go run outside but I try to do it. I got some thick skin.
Saul Marquez:
And that’s awesome man. Good for you. And what’s your number one success habit?
Ardy Arianpour:
You know I think it’s just persistence and consistence not just being persistent but you have to be consistent with persistence and you know I never give up. It doesn’t matter what the naysayers say a lot of people told us that this was impossible. And you know we just never gave up. And you have to have an amazing family and support group around you and advisors just never give up and it’s a constant mission every minute.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, Ardy. So what book would you recommend to the listeners?
Ardy Arianpour:
Oh my favorite book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
Saul Marquez:
Great One Love that folks. You can get all of the details. A full transcript the short notes, links to Seqster and everything that we’ve discussed today go to outcomesrocket.health, in the search bar type in Seqster. It’s s e q s t e r because we’re all seeking – S E Q S T E R outcomesrocket.health. Look it up there. This has been fun, Ardy. I really enjoyed it. Leave us with the closing thought and then the best place for the listeners could learn more about your work.
Ardy Arianpour:
Yeah. You know I think you said it even better than me so everyone is seeking health data. Doesn’t matter if you are a payer provider or clinical research enterprise or if you’re just an individual so you can get in touch by contacting us to see a demo at info@seqster.com or just follow us on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding Ardy. This has been a blast and definitely looking forward to seeing you guys grow the platform and to get it into my own hands and another listeners are too. Thanks again.
Ardy Arianpour:
Thanks so much.
Thanks for listening to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.outcomesrocket.com for the show notes, resources, inspiration and so much more.
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