Seqster's Ardy Arianpour on How To Smash Health Data Siloes

The Harry Glorikian Show

Your medical records don't make pleasant bedtime reading. And not only are they inscrutable—they're often mutually (and deliberately) incompatible, meaning different hospitals and doctor's offices can't share them across institutional boundaries. Harry's guest this week, Ardy Arianpour, is trying to fix all that. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Seqster, a San Diego company that’s spent the last five years working on ways to pull patient data from all the places where it lives, smooth out all the formatting differences, and create a unified picture that patients themselves can understand and use.

The way Ardy explains it, Seqster “smashes the data siloes.” Meaning, the company can combine EMR data, gene sequence data, wearable device data, pharmacy data, and insurance claims data all in one place. The big goal guiding Seqster, he says, is to put the patient back at the center of healthcare.

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Full Transcript

Harry Glorikian: Hello. I’m Harry Glorikian. Welcome to The Harry Glorikian Show, the interview podcast that explores how technology is changing everything we know about healthcare. Artificial intelligence. Big data. Predictive analytics. In fields like these, breakthroughs are happening way faster than most people realize.

If you want to be proactive about your own health and the health of your loved ones, you’ll need to learn everything you can about how medicine is changing and how you can take advantage of all the new options.

Explaining this approaching world is the mission of my new book, The Future You. And it’s also our theme here on the show, where we bring you conversations with the innovators, caregivers, and patient advocates who are transforming the healthcare system and working to push it in positive directions.

If you’ve ever gotten a copy of your medical files from your doctor or hospital, you probably know these records don’t make pleasant bedtime reading.

They aren’t designed to be clear or user-friendly for patients. In fact, it's usually just the opposite.

The data itself is highly technical. And on top of that, there’s the inscrutable formatting, which is dictated by whatever electronic medical record or “EMR” system your provider happens to use.

But the problem isn’t just that EMR data is incomprehensible.

It’s also that different EMRs are often incompatible with each other.

So if you’re being treated by multiple providers, it can be really tricky to share your data across institutional boundaries.

That’s why medicine is one of