A company that wants to be the Mint.com for health data secures backing from major pharma company

Health technology company Seqster is focused on helping patients bring all their health information into one place.

The San Diego-based company, which launched in 2016, announced Thursday it secured backing from Japanese pharmaceutical giant Takeda Pharmaceutical. 

The companies did not disclose the funding amount.

The funds will be used to accelerate the adoption of the company's interoperability technology for enhancing clinical trials, patient engagement and outcomes, the company said.

"Seqster’s technology is a very unique platform that addresses interoperability on not only a nationwide scale but also globally. Interoperability is one of the biggest barriers to applying precision medicine to clinical trials and patient engagement," Bruce Meadows, head of investments at Takeda Digital Ventures, said in a statement.

Seqster's platform retrieves, parses and harmonizes multidimensional data sets to help accelerate the entire drug development process and provides clinical trial participants a platform to share their data with investigators in real time creating a longitudinal health record, according to the company.

Before the Takeda investment, the company raised at least $4 million in seed funding.

The company's name, Seqster (pronounced seekster), comes from the idea that everyone is "seeking" health data, company CEO and co-founder Ardy Arianpour told FierceHealthcare during Health Datapalooza this week.

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Arianpour said he was motivated to launch the startup as a result of his mother's experience as a cancer patient and the challenge of aggregating health data from multiple providers and hospitals.

As a health technology entrepreneur, Arianpour has a background in genomics and big data. Prior to starting Seqster, he helped bring next-generation DNA sequencing to the clinic as chief strategy officer of Pathway Genomics as well as senior vice president of Ambry Genetics, which Konica acquired for $1 billion in 2017.

Seqster aims to provide "person-centric interoperability," he said.

"When I started on this journey I didn't know what interoperability was," he said. "Recently a former executive from a large EHR vendor came to us and said: 'You cracked interoperability."

The platform is designed to pull together episodic clinical electronic health record (EHR) data, baseline genetic DNA results and continuous fitness/wearable device data all in one place. The company's technology standardizes and harmonizes different data sources on the back end and then organizes and visualizes those health data in an easily accessible format.

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Arianpour compares the platform to the personal finance management platform Mint.com, which was designed to be a platform that brought all of an individual's financial information together to a single place.

Seqster is not a consumer-facing platform, but licenses it to enterprise customers such as providers and payers. The platform currently connects users to more than 3,600 healthcare providers and over 150,000 hospitals and clinics nationwide.

Other companies taking a stab at aggregating patient records include Picnic Health, which collects and digitizes health records, and PatientBank, which offers online medical record sharing. Apple also launched its Health Records feature that is now supported by hundreds of hospitals, medical clinics and specialty practices.

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One distinction from Apple Health Records is that Seqster is platform-agnostic, the company says. It also enables families to aggregate health data to form a multigenerational health record, an idea that has raised privacy concerns

In January, the company added new interoperability features it says will help its customers more easily share longitudinal health information across various sources. Seqster improved its connectivity to providers by adopting the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard through the FHIR application programming interface, the company said.

The company says the new platform can help healthcare providers and health plans come into compliance with upcoming federal interoperability regulations to be released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.