Health Data is Medicine - CEO & Co-Founder of Seqster, Ardy Arianpour

05/06/22 • 52 min

More Intelligent Tomorrow: a DataRobot Podcast

In a world where companies like Meta, Google, and Apple collect and benefit from vast amounts of data about you, what would it be like if you were in control of your data instead? Specifically, what would it be like if you were in control of your health data? And what if you had it all in one easy to access place?

CEO and Co-Founder Ardy Arianpour came on the podcast to tell Dave Anderson how and why Seqster is giving people that kind of control over their own health data. Adry says patient-centric data interoperability is healthcare’s biggest challenge and it’s his number one mission.

Seqster is a technology company working to break down the silos within the world of healthcare and make health data interoperability easy and universal.
Making Health Data Interoperable
Data is the gold of the twenty-first century. But interoperability of data is the moonshot. It’s not enough to collect the data, it also needs to be accessible and usable, and it turns out interoperability is hard to do. Ardy says that Seqster is the first company to make the idea work.

Dave asks why interoperability is so hard to do. It’s because lab data is different from wearable data, which is different from data from your doctor, which is different from data from your dentist, and so on. All your data needs to be extracted and keyed in such a way it can be cross referenced.

But putting it all together isn't enough. You must also think about the patient’s experience.

“How do you connect the dots quickly and how do you visualize this data?"

The data needs to be easy for both patients and providers to access and read.

"What are they going to do with my data?”

You're already giving your doctor and other providers access to your data. But you’re not really in control of it from that point on. This year, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services interoperability rules stated that every single patient must have access to their healthcare data. Seqster wants to put the patient in control.

Dave follows up by asking what is being done with all this data? Who is using it and how?

It’s mostly clinical and decentralized trials, Ardy says. By using these data sets, both the cost and the time required to complete trials and develop new pharmaceuticals and therapies are vastly reduced.

Imagine what happens when you can collect a million patients’ data in an hour versus 18 months and then look at them all in one place? Ardy says we get more accurate information which results in better and faster development of new medicines and vaccines. Breaking down the silos that contain health data allows for a bigger picture of health for all of us.

With enough data, from enough patients, and with the right funding, Ardy thinks cancer is a problem we can solve. Dave wonders if health data could be like being an organ donor. Could we mark a box on a form and agree to donate our health data to science after our deaths?

Listen to this episode to learn more about:

The problems around siloed health data and his solution
How to address privacy concerns around healthcare data
Ardy’s personal journey that brought him to this field
Why Big Pharma isn't evil
Bill Gates's advice to Ardy on getting Seqster to scale
The decade of biological revolution
The business model to make this work

But putting it all together isn't enough. You must also think about the patient’s experience.

“How do you connect the dots quickly and how do you visualize this data?"

The data needs to be easy for both patients and providers to access and read.

"What are they going to do with my data?”

Dave follows up by asking what is being done with all this data? Who is using it and how?

Listen to this episode to learn more about:

The problems around siloed health data and his solution
How to address privacy concerns around healthcare data
Ardy’s personal journey that brought him to this field
Why Big Pharma isn't evil
Bill Gates's advice to Ardy on getting Seqster to scale
The decade of biological revolution
The business model to make this work

Previous Episode

The New Economy Will Require Empathy - Brian Solis

More Intelligent Tomorrow host Dave Anderson sits down with Brain Solis to talk about interesting ways to get creative solutions to our long-standing challenges.

Dave Anderson is a keynote speaker, tech evangelist, and podcast host with a refreshing perspective on marketing, analytics, and technology.

Brian Solis is a digital analyst, speaker, and author. Brian currently serves as the Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. His work focuses on thought leadership and research into studying disruptive technologies.

They begin their conversation talking about what disruption is and what it isn’t.

At the heart of it, disruption isn't about technology. It's about changing the norm. It’s about shaking people out of their comfortable ways of thinking to find new and better ways to approach problems.

Doing the same thing over and over can saturate a market. Eventually it calls out for something new. Just like a wildfire can renew a forest, disruption becomes a means for reinvigorating a market.

But companies today are still using legacy systems designed for scale and efficiency to protect themselves from disruption in the future. They're still the wrong tools for the job.

“76% of all employees say that they don't feel that they have the digital skills necessary to work in this new economy.”

We don't have all the answers. We can only scenario plan so much. That's the nature of disruption. If we’re going to fix this skill gap and be ready for change to come, everyone needs to feel involved. Everyone needs to feel relevant. Agreeing to change requires empathy toward everyone involved.
Empathy is just as important as intelligence.

By being empathetic to what the workforce needs to succeed in the future, we can build these skills into our education system. We can bring up a generation that’s prepared to take on new disruptions and thrive.

The best way to accelerate creativity and innovation within organizations is to be empathetic and give people the room they need to follow ideas that are outside their normal work. Companies like Google with their 20% program not only understand this, but they practice it.

Empathy is understanding how someone else sees the world. A lack of empathy is one of the reasons we don’t respond well to change. Without empathy, we lack a sense of urgency to change that doesn't immediately impact us. The gift of empathy is a powerful tool.

An anecdote from Brian about the TV show, Ted Lasso, brings him around to talking about how company management needs to develop more empathy.

A problem with current leadership is that they don't stop to ask questions. They aren't curious. They don't put themselves in their customer or employee's positions. They need to learn to ask “why” over and over. Kids do it naturally, and we should embrace it as a path toward continuous evolution.

Dave closed out the show by asking Brian how he thinks we get more intelligent.

“Try not to be better than anyone else, try to be better than you were yesterday.”

This episode includes discussion of:

Embracing disruption as an agent of positive change
Asking if we're ready for the changes ahead of us or planning for the a future using tools of the past.
Leveraging empathy to find creative solutions to our problems
The role of empathy in our thinking about education
Asking, “why” over and over as a tool to achieving continuous evolution

Next Episode

Having Your Own Genetic Personal Trainer - FOXO Technologies

More Intelligent Tomorrow host Dave Anderson got a chance to catch up with FOXO Technologies’ Tyler Danielson and Nichole Rigby to discuss longevity, epigenetics, and rethinking life insurance.

Tyler Danielson is the Chief Technology Officer at FOXO Technologies with a history of working in the financial services and commerce industries. Nichole Rigby is the Director of Data Science and Bioinformatics at FOXO Technologies. She’s a data scientist specializing in analyzing genetic and other biological data.

FOXO Technologies is a company that’s bringing epigenetics together with AI to disrupt the insurance industry. It’s creating models to classify human health based on epigenetic data and using those models for the goal of underwriting life insurance.

Since epigenetics is a new term for most of us, Dave asked Nichole to explain it.

At the most basic level, epigenetics are the chemical modifications that exist along the outside of DNA strands and affect gene expression. They’re not your genes, which are coded into your DNA and don’t change. Epigenetics are chemicals that sit on the gene and are responsible for the expression of those genes.

We’re still learning what controls and influences epigenetics. But we do know they change over a person’s lifetime. Some are naturally expressed, and others are affected by factors such as diet and exercise.

David says he’s been hearing more and more about epigenetics lately. Is this new science, or are we just noticing it more?

While it’s a new field of study, the public is getting familiar with the idea of individual genetic data thanks to the rise of consumer genetic testing services.

An epigenetic test starts with collecting a saliva sample, so it’s less invasive than a traditional blood test.

When your doctor runs a blood test, they’re usually looking for specific indicators which will tell, for example, if you’re a smoker. The advantage of epigenetic testing is that it returns a much wider range of information.

For an insurance company, the results could be useful for determining if it should insure someone and for how much.

"Human made epigenetics risk classification is a challenge."

This is a new approach to risk classification. Because the insurance industry already has a long-standing history of using existing actuary tables, the acceptance of epigenetic testing as a tool for risk classification is proving to be one of the biggest challenges for FOXO.

But the use of AI has helped them uncover new insights. With just a single sample, FOXO can quantify more than 850,000 sites along the genome overnight.

"I'm here to do really cool science with the potential ... to help humans and make the world a better place."

FOXO is unique in using epigenetics as a wellness report. It’s the first company to combine epigenetics, wellness, and insurance.

Dave wants to know how we get to a more intelligent tomorrow with epigenetics.

Nichole’s answer is with lots and lots of data. Tyler wants insurance companies to take a step back and reconsider how to help its customers live longer.

In this episode, learn more about how FOXO Technologies is seeking to disrupt the insurance industry including: