Health Data Aggregation: How SEQSTER Ensures Comprehensive Integration

Thank you so much for having me on your amazing show and looking forward to the discussion as always. Happy 2024.

Yeah, I think everyone has their journey of where they go from point A to point Z. Sometimes you think it’s going to be linear. Mine was very twisted and through obstacles and through fires and walking on water. You name it, I’ve gone through it. I’ve been in the health tech, biotech, and life sciences, particularly industries for the last, oh, 22 years since 2002. But my journey started in 1996 when I was 16 years old at the prestigious Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That was at the time when I saw firsthand what researchers were doing in the lab. Then from there, I went on and I was pre-med. Unfortunately, didn’t make it through, but I graduated with a biological sciences degree. Then I got into actually sales and marketing at a very young age when I was 21 years old within biotech and life sciences and mostly in the research tools side. In the early 2000s, the genome was being sequenced for hundreds of millions of dollars by the US government, and a guy named Craig Venter at the time was running a company called Solera Genomics that was NIH-backed, and there was a race to the whole genome.

I was always fascinated with DNA, and whole genome sequencing because I was lucky enough to be raised in San Diego, California, which is the mecca of where genome and genomic technology has been born. Being around that innovation, I got into next-gen sequencing, DNA sequencing. I got into certain companies that were dealing with clinical diagnostics on the cancer side, on the rare disease side, and the diagnostic odyssey side for children. I was able to touch various facets of technology, research, bioinformatics, and data science, and of course, I had some experience in commercialization and some family DNA in marketing and business. Yes, I was blessed with that. When you put that all together, I became an executive in my late ’20s and took a startup that was around not even 20 employees to over a thousand with very little investment as the Senior Vice President of that company. I started certain divisions within genomics services that hit on pharmaceutical companies that wanted to outsource that service to those that had our types of innovation in technology. I was part of the SCOTUS decision, which is the ruling for gene patents for breast cancer, and fought Marriott Genetics in federal court with three other people at the company, and we prevailed.

That’s how we had a billion-dollar exit. The last company I was part of sold to Konica Minolta and the Sovereign Fund of Japan for $1 billion US cash. I was in my early 30s when that happened. I was always thinking about the next thing to do. I was sick of the lab business. I was a big Napster user, and I loved how music sharing would happen. I thought, what if you made a platform or a technology that can share all your data, all your electronic medical records, all your genomic DNA data, all your medical device and wearable data? I founded SEQSTER in 2016. In January, SEQSTER just turned eight. I was running around the J. P. Morgan Health Care conference with my green backpack. It’s still here. With my business idea in here, I call it the bulletproof backpack. No competitors can take us down because the secret sauce was always in my backpack. They were trying to go after me. They should have gone for my backpack instead. That’s a whole another story because so many people tried to steal from us and failed in this process. Now, fast forward eight years, and we are backed by Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

23mees and Wojiki, founder and CEO, of United Health Care Group investors, the largest payer in the United States. We have a dozen partnerships that relate to the top 10 pharma companies in the world, to the largest patient registries, to the largest contract research organizations that want to connect the dots of data for patient-centric interoperability. I couldn’t be more proud of our team at SEQSTER.

It’s so simple but yet so complex. I’ll break it down for you. We started with the patient and consumer. Most digital health companies want to go the other way around. If not all, I think we’re the only ones that started actually with no business plan just a mission. My mom is a breast cancer survivor. My dad is a colon cancer survivor. Both my grandparents passed away due to Alzheimer’s disease. Of course, having spent two decades in sciences, genomics, and data, I know a little bit about what you shouldn’t do, I guess you could say. That’s always more important. At the time, we didn’t know how big this healthcare data interoperability problem was until McKinsey told us that the numbers, according to McKinsey from 2016, are a 35 to 40 billion annualized ballooning problem, meaning every year, a 40 billion-plus. I don’t even know what the numbers are now. 100 billion plus ever since eight years ago, plus you add COVID on top of Even I always said COVID was a data interoperability issue. It wasn’t a vaccine issue. Most people didn’t understand that. Governments didn’t understand that. That’s a whole another political conversation. But how we solved it was by not trying to solve the big problem.

In hindsight, it looks really easy because we started with a patient consumer, and we built something that we learned from Fintech. We took a Fintech approach to the architecture, to health tech. In health care, unfortunately, everything is so archaic. When you’re dealing with medical records, when you’re dealing with providers, when you’re dealing with payers, when you’re dealing with clinical trials, when you’re dealing with decentralized trials now, these things are either very new or they’re very archaic. There’s lots of room for innovation. We focused on the patient, We focused on families. We focused on the caregiver to be able to bring that data in. Then everything else followed. Pharma then saw that we built a patient engagement platform that could bring data. Then those come in Companies started building with their engineers, with Deloitte, with McKinsey, with PWC, with folks out of India, with folks out of Singapore, with folks globally in the Middle East, out of Dubai. It didn’t matter where you were located. If you had an interoperability problem at the NHS, you were calling SEQSTER because you heard from word of mouth that we were working on this incredible, challenging, ginormous problem that’s not the number one problem, that’s not the number two problem, that’s not the number three problem.

It is number one two, and three combined for all of health Without data, you can’t do AI. You can’t run LLMs. Without data, you can’t get care coordination. Without data, you can’t do anything for the patient or the provider. This is when you seek health data upon the request of the patient or individual and give access to the provider via consent, that individual authorizes This is where it’s a total game changer. I couldn’t be more excited for our latest announcement which was just January 16th for our one-click records for life sciences and health care.

When you’re talking about DNA data, and that’s where we came from, hence the word SEQSTER. The reason why I named the company SEQSTER, other that I wanted to create a healthcare type of Napster for data sharing, not music sharing, as I mentioned. There was no such word as SEQSTER. I bought SEQSTER for $9.99 on Godaddy. Com. True story. I have the records to prove It’s an incredible journey. Now it’s saved tens of thousands of lives. The reason is that we built this foundational technology where we started with DNA data, and the sequencing data, and We mixed, stir, stirred, made a nice cocktail. I call it a good old-fashioned with a double black cherry on top. We have all the ingredients to create this longitudinal health record for both patients, providers, pharma companies, and any type of life science or healthcare enterprise. Whether that’s launching a patient registry, whether that’s for A parent who wants to do care coordination for their child who has a rare condition in the diagnostic odyssey of some sort. Now, with DNA data, it’s ATCG. It doesn’t matter what instrumentation the DNA sequencer spits out on the DNA data.

But when you’re talking about medical data when it comes out of Mayo Clinic, it’s completely different than when it comes out of Stanford or MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering or NYU or Emory, wherever that data may reside in the United States, and of course, globally, too. But in the United States, particularly, the health data interoperability in the shoe is a gigantic spider web on top of another spider web, on top of another layered spider web. That’s because of how the business of healthcare has been run and how the data has been siloed. We unsilo that data, whether that’s coming from one institution or a provider combine it with your Apple Watch data, your Garmin data, even your old jawbone data. There are 25 million people that have a jawbone, and people don’t even remember that wearable, but that data is siloed actually in the jawbone cloud. We’re able to access that per the request and consent of the patients. Of course, the use cases for us were very clear because we were backed by pharma, and so they built a patient engagement platform so that it could be deployed for clinical trials, decentralized trials, trial recruitment and retention, and various use cases where we have expanded and are impacting patient lives at scale.

It’s phenomenal the work that our team and these amazing innovators that run healthcare, that run pharma companies, that run startup companies, that run various digital health initiatives. I couldn’t be so proud.

Yeah, this is so important. One of the four pillars that I not only with our engineering team, not only for our company at the beginning, other than our mission of just helping patients and saving lives with data, was the privacy, security, and transparency, which is so important. SEQSTER does not own your data. It’s so important. At the time when I founded the company, we hated Facebook, and we still do, because of how they control data and how they sell your data, and that’s how they do business with the advertisements and things like that. In health care, that model will never work. The reason why it doesn’t work is that you have a cancer patient, you have an autoimmune disease patient, you have a rare disease patient. They don’t want to have you steal their data. They want to advance research. We created the first operating system. It’s not even a platform. It’s an operating system that gets deployed and white-labeled for life science companies such as pharma companies, patient registries, providers, and various folks who want to connect all the dots to all this data. The most important thing about privacy and security is how data gets collected.

Because you, the patient, are in control, you have full ownership, there’s transparency before we even get into the privacy and security. For privacy and security purposes, we built 256-bit encryption. All the data is scrambled. For example, this is true, and this is what’s so amazing about SEQSTER. In the United States and globally, you have data breaches all the time, maybe on credit card companies, maybe on some mailer that you were on, maybe you went to some hotel and Hilton or Marriott got hacked. At some point, all our data has been unfortunately breached. With SEQSTER’s data, it’s different. Even if it does get breached, we’ve taken every measure to make it as protected as possible, more secure than even the Cleveland Clinic, which is the top institution in the United States that has all the security and all the money that you can think of. Even more secure than Stanford, then Harvard partners, then Dana Farber, you name it. Why? You may ask. The reason is all those institutions were built on archaic architecture that they’re not going to change. They have millions of patients that they see every month, every year, or whatever their volumes are.

They have one patient identifier for their entire database. But with SEQSTER, when Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, whoever it may be, Takeda, When they utilize our technology and they deploy it for their clinical trial or decentralized trials, what’s amazing is if there’s 10, 100, 10,000, a million patients that are going to be aggregating their data, powered by SEQSTER, using that instance within their environment. There are 1 million encryption keys. There are 10,000 encryption keys. There are 100 encryption keys. There are 10 encryption keys, depending on if you have 10, 100, 10,000, or a million patients within that trial that are aggregating the data. It’s all scrambled. If you look at your keyboard, your allergies and analytes are in box A, your first name and birthday are in box U, and so forth. It’s completely scrambled. That’s why it’s so secure. That’s why these enormous companies, Fortune 5 companies, are working with us because we pass their security and privacy audits with flying colors. It’s always green for us, like the color of the company.

Yeah. A couple. When we first started and Takeda invested in us, they, along with McKinsey Management Consulting Company, Deloitte, Accenture, along Boston Consulting Group, all these amazing consulting groups that the big companies can afford to hire and pay hundreds of millions of dollars to, they were able to tell us which path to take, which was so important. Now, we didn’t get paid by them, but we didn’t have to pay them $50 million of their time. They gave us $50 million of their time. What’s amazing about What we thought that is right away we knew which clear use cases we should build for. Not only did we have patients, not only did we have data, but we had experienced folks who understood from the 30,000-foot level as well as they could see the data at the fine print ground level that SEQSTER was delivering. A couple of use cases that we started first were on the engagement side. It was on the care coordination side. It was running certain tumor boards. One personality that hit close to home, was my father, unfortunately, had some rectal bleeding.

This was on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago. Next thing, we tell him to go take the Coligard test by ExactSciences. It’s a genomic profiling test to see if you have any abnormal cells within your stool, which relates to fast-tracking you to a colonoscopy. We did that, and he, unfortunately, had positive abnormal results. He was rushed to a colonoscopy right away, and he’s on a system called Kaiser. There are about 12 million patients in the Kaiser health system in the United States, which mostly powers the state of California’s patients. However, they are outside of California as well. What was interesting was how on a Saturday, I was able to run a tumor board with all his results before his GI calls, and we were able to get second opinion letters from top pathologists on the care coordination with a click of a button to share that data per his consent, and me being the since we built all these features. We were able to get him in surgery in less than a week versus 9, or 10 weeks. That meant that they were able to take out a 50 mm tumor in his ascending colon and save his life.

SEQSTER and my team and the team of pathologists saved my father’s life. How? Because health data is medicine. That’s when I realized that, and I trademarked and owned health data as medicine because of my father. Because I realized that, wow, this is so powerful that with our technology, it’s great to do business. It’s great to get amazing partners. But how many founders and CEOs do you know who have created a technology that saves their own father’s life? Granted, many other family members that I could get into on a whole other call. Many strangers’ lives. This is where the coverage has been. That’s where our platform shines because it’s not a platform. It’s an operating system. We’ve created the SEQSTER OS, where all these amazing modules can reside and various use cases can hit, whether that’s care coordination, which is what we did for my dad on the provider side, or if it’s a clinical trial, decentralized trial, and in COVID, people were at home, how are they going to get to the sites? We’re able with our one-click records, to power any clinical sites. We’re able to power any provider. We’re able to power any pharmaceutical organization, any payer, to bring claims data, EMR data, genomics data, social of health data, and Rx Pharmacy data, to create a longitudinal health record.

It’s the Holy Grail of medicine.

I’ve learned so many lessons, and I’ve learned so much from so many people. I travel 250,000 plus miles a year globally, and you have to have an open perspective. I think part of the problem is most people are closed-minded. Most people are bureaucratic. You have to know how to cut the red tape very quickly. That’s one thing I learned. You have to find stakeholders that understand that you have to Life-saving technology. Every single minute, every single second, someone is dying because we’re not getting our technology into someone’s hands. It’s also sad, right? But the biggest takeaway for me over the past eight years as SEQSTER plus 22 plus years just doing this every day is the fact that it’s always day one. I have more energy today than I did when I started 22 years ago. I have more energy today than when I started SEQSTER on January 10th, 2016, running around J. P. Morgan at a healthcare conference with my green backpack. I have more energy today than yesterday. That is the secret sauce.

Yeah, look, I speak at numerous different conferences, both domestically in the United States of America and globally. I just got back just a few months ago from speaking in Rome. I speak in Switzerland all the time because pharma is there. Wherever your market is, you should try to spend time there. You shouldn’t focus on just your backyard because you have to get new perspectives. I’ve learned more and we’ve been more successful and we’ve gotten investors because I have gone internationally versus just focusing on just domestic. I’ll tell you why. Because it doesn’t matter what color you are, it doesn’t matter what religion you are. It doesn’t matter what school or credential you have. It doesn’t matter how tall you are or how much you weigh. At the end of the day, a patient is a patient. If you want to get that worldview, and if you want people to understand your view as well, you have to go outside of your comfort zone. I thrive in uncomfortable situations. That’s just my DNA, but practice makes perfect for that as well. When you create a technology, a product, a platform, or an operating system that solves a magnitude of challenges in health care, everyone from Bill Gates to Ariana Huffington to XYZ wants to speak to The reason being is that there’s nothing greater than your health being your wealth.

Once you make a little bit of money, and whatever that number is for you individually, you start focusing on your health. You start focusing on your well-being. You start focusing on that because you want to live forever as healthy as, as happy as you can be. There’s nothing that can beat that.

I’m always ready. Shoot. Okay.

I would love to talk to animals because I think it’s just something that goes outside of your comfort zone, and nobody can do that. Okay.

Oh, 100%, I would say it would have to be during the time that the Persian Empire was at its greatest. The reason is because I would love to have been part of it. Interesting.

Oh, that’s easy. It’s pizza for me. I’m a diehard pizza guy, and my favorite pizza is Joe’s Pizza in New York City. There’s a couple of them that’s called Joe’s the Slice. By far the best pizza. Anytime I’m in New York and I get all these folks taking me to these fancy dinners, I eat a salad for dinner because, for lunch and breakfast, I go buy a big pie of pepperoni mushroom pizza, extra well done, and there’s nothing more to it. Amazing.

Oh, hidden talent. I don’t know. I think if you asked my family, maybe they would say a different answer. I think my hidden talent is that I don’t get tired. I get more energized, and I thrive off of success. I thrive off of celebrating the small wins, and that’s how I’ve been able to get to where I am in my life.

I love Eblasts, and my team calls me Blaster Master. All right.

My last Google search was a particular drug that is coming out on the GLP T1 because of all the great things that Novo Nordisk and some of these other pharma companies were doing. It’s actually up on my screen right next to you here.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.