Access and Manage All of Your Health Information on One Platform: Seqster

Healthcare is one of the major issues plaguing the American economy. In the wise words of the legendary investor Warren Buffett, “Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness.” It is a well-known fact that Americans pay the highest prices for healthcare. A lack of access to and exchange of health information is a major contributor to the healthcare delivery cost. A bold start-up with an ambitious plan is tackling this problem by helping millions of Americans manage their health data.

Seqster, founded in 2016, recently unveiled an innovative technology platform that places consumers at the center of their health by enabling seamless consolidation and management of all of their valuable health information on a single platform. Ancestry, genomics data and electronic health records (EHR) can be aggregated and preserved within minutes of signing up. With all of the health information in one place, consumers are empowered to take control of their health in ways that are not currently possible. Most of all, Seqster addresses the “tapeworm” directly by slicing the $30B annual wasted spending from the lack of interoperability.

The Spark

Ardy Arianpour, the Co-founder and CEO of Seqster, is a serial entrepreneur in the biotechnology industry with some very successful companies under his belt. He was one of the first people to be whole genome sequenced and realized that his DNA data was being siloed. Seqster was born out of his quest to combine electronic health records (EHR), DNA, and fitness data.

Ardy had seen how other markets had been disrupted by focusing on the consumer and removing the middleman and discovered that by endowing data ownership, transparency, privacy and control to consumers, he could solve the interoperability problem.

While data silos have been a healthcare challenge, the loss of critical family data is even more crucial. When Ardy’s grandmother passed away due to complications from Alzheimer’s Disease, he was struck by the fact that he not only lost her health data, which could have helped him navigate his health journey, but society also lost this valuable dataset that could have been used for advancing medical research. Seqster was able to create HealthTrust™ - the first ever legal framework for passing on health data, thereby forming a longitudinal multi-generational health record.

The First Major Feature That Got the Ball Rolling

Seqster’s HealthOne™ allows users to aggregate all of their and their family’s health data in one place, solving interoperability across EHR, DNA and fitness data silos.

The company emerged from stealth on February 28th, 2018 and launched its first major partnership with Boston University, after being chosen as the platform of choice by thousands of participants from the Traumatic Brain Study. Since its launch, Seqster has partnered with The George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers to enable caregivers to aggregate all the health data of their family and loved ones. San Diego Blood Bank, a prestigious 70-year old institution, was recently announced as a key partner for a joint wellness portal for over 50,000 blood donors connecting all of their health data. Recently Seqster was chosen by the World Frontiers Forum for The 2018 Convergence Project that aims to bring health to millions of people globally.

Initial Challenges & Incorporating Customer Feedback

The company is extremely mission-oriented and is offering its technology to the people and entities that need it the most. Seqster has had to turn away opportunities that didn’t align with its core mission. Different entities benefit from Seqster’s technology in various ways:

• Consumer: Monitor all your and your family’s health in one place
• Foundations: Engage your donors/members
• Pharma: Identify patients and rapidly populate clinical studies
• Provider: Track quality of care and outcomes
• Payors: Align payment with performance

Seqster’s 5 biggest assets

• TEAM– Multidisciplinary team with backgrounds in Data Science, Bioinformatics, Engineering, Genomics and Commercialization.
• TECHNOLOGY– Nationwide scale with EHR data standardized and harmonized across 2000+ hospitals & 8000+ medical groups, all consumer genomic and top fitness/wearable data.
• TRUST– 1st legal framework “HealthTrust^™” to preserve and pass on family health data.
• TRANSPARENCY– Users have full ownership and control of their health data.
• TRACK RECORD– Successful commercialization and scaling startups to enterprise value over $1B

Seqster is at the intersection of tech and life sciences, directly addressing the challenges in healthcare. By putting people at the center of healthcare and disrupting the data silos, Seqster has solved interoperability from a consumer angle.

Meet the bold entrepreneur behind Seqster

Ardy Arianpour is the CEO & Co-Founder of Seqster. Prior to starting Seqster, Ardy launched several clinical and consumer-based genetic tests and served as the CCO of Pathway Genomics, and SVP of Ambry Genetics that sold to Konica for $1B in 2017. He is one of the main architects in launching the first commercial clinical exome sequencing test in 2011, while establishing the value of next-gen sequencing in the clinic. As a key player in the 2013 landmark SCOTUS decision scrapping gene patents, he also played an instrumental role in expanding genetic testing access with the launch of BRCA testing, benefiting patients and family members across the country.

Ardy Arianpour received his BS in Biological Sciences from UC Irvine and MBA from Marshall Goldsmith School of Management.

“Our mission is to allow people to collect, own and share their complete health information in a seamless manner.”