Digital health and interoperability: the pharmaphorum podcast

One of the biggest barriers to applying precision medicine to clinical trials and patient engagement is getting different digital health systems to talk to each other.

Seqster is one company tackling such issues of interoperability, and its CEO and co-founder Ardy Arianpour joined the pharmaphorum podcast to discuss how it applies a person-centric approach to empowering patients.

The San Diego-based tech start-up’s research portal gathers patient data, such as electronic health records, genetic information and fitness results from wearables, to improve the way health data can be shared.

It’s an aim that’s high on the agenda of bodies such as the Centers for Medicare and and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the US, whose new interoperability rules have just been finalised.

Seqster’s research portal currently connects users to over 3,000 healthcare providers and more than 100,000 hospitals and clinics in the US, giving patients a way to manage all their health data from one mobile app.

The firm recently secured strategic investment from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, via its Takeda Digital Ventures arm. The pharma company has said it wants Seqster to be a ‘cornerstone’ of its digital health strategy, and Ardy also talked about what the deal involves.

A biotech and digital health entrepreneur, he played an instrumental role in expanding genetic testing access with the launch of BRCA testing and was a key player in the 2013 landmark SCOTUS decision scrapping gene patents.

Prior to starting Seqster, Ardy launched several clinical and consumer-based genetic tests as CCO of Pathway Genomics and served as SVP of Ambry Genetics, which was sold to Konica in 2017 for $1 billion.

You can listen to episode 18 of the pharmaphorum podcast here, download the episode to your computer or find it – and subscribe to the rest of the series in iTunes, Spotify, acast and Stitcher.