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 Welcome to this Week in Health it events where we amplify great ideas with interviews from the floor. My name is Bill Russell. We're covering healthcare, CIO, and creator of this week in health. It a set of podcasts and videos dedicated to developing the next generation of health leaders. . We wanna thank our founding channel sponsors who have made this content possible, health lyrics and VMware.

If you wanna be a part of our mission to develop health leaders, go to our homepage this week, health.com, and click on sponsorship information. This week we're at the health conference in Las Vegas, and we have a bunch of interviews lined up for you. Here's a discussion with RDRE, por, the CEO of sester, an exciting patient-centric data aggregation platform.

This is like one of the few conferences I, I've signed up for is media. And I got reached out by like a hundred different companies, but your company I actually reached out to. 'cause I love what you guys are doing. So give us a little idea of what Seester is and what you guys are, are really trying to accomplish.

Sure. First of all, thanks so much for reaching out. Um, we're flattered to be on your show, number one. Number two, it's great to be in Vegas. And this is our first interview too today, so it's exciting. Um, we put the person at the center of healthcare disrupting all their episodic EHR data and adding their continuous monitoring and wearable data, as well as bringing together all of their DNA.

And baseline genetic data all in one place. Essentially creating the mint.com of your health data and allowing you to share that longitudinal health data on your terms. Yeah, which is great. And, and no industry. I mean, mint is a great example 'cause no industry other than, I mean, healthcare could use it so much.

'cause you're not just talking about . Uh, health system data. You're also talking about genomic data. So I've had my genome sequence down in San Diego by a company, and I could pull that into your platform. That's right, yeah. You're also talking about my, my our wearable data. Yeah. Wearable data is garments.

Apple watches, you know, even an old jawbone that's in the drawer. We can bring all that data together. 'cause all that data is being siloed on either the device or in the lab or in the institution as you knew, being ACIO and the health. You know, systems industry. Yeah. Well, well, let's start with interoperability.

Yes. Okay. So, um, a lot of my listeners are health systems and they're sitting there going, okay, how are you doing this? I mean, sure. 'cause you have how many different EHRs, and then beyond the hrs you have many different PAC systems and whatnot. How so? How are you doing this? Yeah. So it was a complete accident, and I really mean that We didn't know what interoperability was.

We couldn't even pronounce the word interoperability. It's not just a $30 billion plus annual ballooning problem for our fragmented, um, US healthcare system, but more importantly, the word is hard to pronounce. And so about two and a half years ago, we had an EXE executive come into our offices and say, you guys cracked the code on, um, consumer interoperability.

And then we figured out that, oh my gosh, we really do have something beyond mint.com. We actually have a business model . That we, uh, modeled around the salesforce.com for healthcare because we had to start with the patients first. It's all patient directed, so whether it's you or your loved ones that gets to collect all their longitudinal data, no matter what the data sources are, how we did it is we started, you know, early on in San Diego.

And we started with just a couple health systems in San Diego, and then we grew out in California and then now we have 3,602 hospitals integrated, um, into Seester. And how we've done that is by standardizing and harmonizing all the epic, Cerner, Allscripts, McKesson, Athena Health, you name it, on the EHR side.

From the genomic side as ATCG, and it doesn't matter what lab it comes from, but when we started looking at the EHR data bill, it was so messy, right? That if we knew it was that messy, we would've never done seester. And we believe everyone is seeking health data. It doesn't matter if you're a payer or a provider or a pharma company or a parents.

So there's a, there's a handful of things. So the first thing, um, people are always asking is, what's the value of it? Right? And so I've talked about on the show before, I've talked about the value of, of having that data, uh, be present wherever you go. Yeah. Right. So, so wherever I go, I can hand that to the physician, but it, it, it goes beyond that, right?

So I can, I can like. Donate my data to research, I can then pass my data along, like in my will. I mean, I, my data could live on Yep. And, and provide value. So talk about some of the use cases. Yeah. Um, there's a couple, well, I, I can tell you a multi-generational health record was not even termed Tell Seester, and that all had to do with my grandmother.

Both my grandmothers passed away, unfortunately, to Alzheimer's disease. My mom was the caregiver of my number one fan who was my 92 year old grandmother who passed away about two and a half years ago, and that was in the middle of us actually building Seester. I wanted to be able to bring my grandma's health data, my mom's health data and my health data in a multi-generational way, and not just on the DNA side, but obviously on the EHR side and any other data that we have.

And so that's where the bequeathing of data and our health trust idea and future came. That's, that's interesting. 'cause one of the reasons, one of the things they talk about is Geisinger has been very effective because they have mostly rural western Pennsylvania. Mm-Hmm. . And it's, they have all this data from generation to generation and it helps them to, uh, to care for the, the future generations.

So there, there is a lot of value. Am I able to take that multi-generational . Record to somebody at this point and they go, oh yeah, look, bill, this is, this is historically in your family, we're going to proactively do these things. Yeah, look, at the end of the day, it's patient authenticated. It's patient directed, I believe

You have to be ACEO of your own health. Yeah. And unfortunately that is the case. And so, you know, another use case is cancer, where, you know, if you wanted to run, let's say a tumor board on yourself and bring together all of the health data in one place and collection of health data, because cancer patients have multiple health systems, multiple pathologists looking at their data.

Maybe you've had your . Tumor even sequenced. And it gets a very complicated, and their number one issue is actually how fast you can collect medical records. This very simple problem where we believe as we're leading the nation with sters interoperability technology that is, you know, got nationwide, uh, scale access now, not just on the health.

Record side, but more importantly, on any type of data side, we've created the, uh, technology to put you again at the center of your health so that even as a caregiver, you can collect and share mom and dad's data or any family member's data as long as you know you have. That senses and all this happens digitally through the platform.

So let's take this from two directions. Uh, let's take it from the patient directive direction and let's take it from the health system direction. I really wanna go to the patient first, but let's go to the health system first. So, um, is there a model where a health system that's looking at their mission and saying, Hey, look, it's in the best interest of the patient, that they have this record.

And that they, they have this aggregation platform. Is there a model where they could partner with Seester, take it into their market? Um, 'cause a lot of 'em are just relying on the EHR providers. They're saying, well, eventually they'll get the genome data in and eventually we'll get the, you know, the, the fitness tracker data in, it'll all be in the EHR.

Of person-centric interoperability. So you go directly to the patient. That's right. The patients are the ones that dictate this, but our business model is that that provider or that payer basically licenses our technology and you know, if they want our front end. And then it becomes their portal. We're not replacing Epic, Cerner, allscripts, or anything like that.

We are not an EHR company, but we are the most comprehensive, nationwide, scalable interoperability solution on the backend. Our backend data model is that Standardizer and Harmonizer of bringing together, you know, Stanford UCSD Scripps, uh, MD Anderson, and NYU all in one place. In, in, in less than 60 seconds.

Instant and rapid interoperability is what Seester iss all about. So, uh, at UGM this year, they talked about, uh, care Anywhere or Care Everywhere. Yes. Care. Well, that would make sense too. Care, care everywhere. That's not bad actually, but one of the, one of the things they end up doing is, uh, I present, I'm in Southern California.

I happen to present in Florida, and I can give them a, you know, one time use to, uh, online EHR. They can go and see my medical record. There's still a problem with that. And it's, they're gonna see my Epic medical record if I happen to go to an allscript shop and go to a, they can't see that shop. They're not, they're still not gonna see that.

Exactly. And that is, that is the. You know, silver lining actually in the most complex interoperability problem, we hear a lot of solutions that, you know, think that they've solved interoperability. But no one actually to our knowledge, has solved it as far as we have on the consumer mediated data exchange, not an HIE.

And so a lot of interoperability solutions are built. For health information exchanges, which have their own problems, but there's no better person bill to collect . A comprehensive longitudinal, multi-generational health record than Bill. So talk about security 'cause that's gonna be the next question.

Absolutely. So we took security bill, um, to the highest degree before we even started, you know, building this. Usually all these companies, even startups, even the bigger companies, they'll get together with a group of engineers and then they'll decide what to build. We did the opposite. We got together with a group of patients and physicians and asked what should we build?

And then we connected our, you know, highly sophisticated engineers that knew how to build these things in order to make this so sticky on the patient engagement side. 'cause patient engagement is something that really misses, even if you try to solve interoperability. On, on, on the, uh, specifics on how we are able to do that and how we are able to push on it is we started with one system and then moved on to another system and moved on to another system, and it was all trial and error through our thousands of patients that came in through our alpha and beta studies in the last four years.

So are you actually taking the data? If so, my, my records, if somebody wants to try to hack 'em. Uh, you Oh, on the security? Yes. I didn't answer that. So, so, security, we two. Sorry. So I, I have stuff at Human Longevity. Yeah. I have stuff at St. Joe's. Yep. I have stuff in Pennsylvania. I have stuff in, so, so, okay.

You know this as ACIO. So if you're, if you're, so you're gonna pull this into your cloud. Yeah. So I'm gonna get there and I should have an answered it before, but I was thinking of something else. So, um, as ACIO, you know this better than anyone. When there's a health system and you have a million patients on that health system, there's one encryption key for basically that whole database.

With Seester, what's different is we created 256 bit encryption, right? Or high trust. We're HIPAA compliant, and that's the investment we made upfront. But more importantly, it's the fact that if we have a million patients that are using the technology or the platform to pull everything in, we have 1 million keys.

So different keys. And so we've taken every repercussion to actually make it as six secure and private as we can. So if they hack one record, they've hacked one record. Yeah. But it's still gibberish, basically. It's scrambled. They can't make use of it either. Yes, right. But they can't, they can't hack the whole database because that's really difficult to do, you know?

But you can do that. On health systems and oh, you, and, and I'm not trying to say that's been proven and you get this. And so from this side, you understand how we're even more secure than health systems because once that data is transferred, it's encrypted right? On that individual level for an individualized health record.

So, alright, so let's talk about the patient. The, uh, we, we talked about it on one of the shows, the value of the health record. I mean, from a security standpoint, we know this, the, the health record is still one of the highest valued records out on the market. The, uh, but there's value in the record to me and there's value to researchers.

Absolutely. And there's actually a couple of situations where people are paying people for their health record. They're saying, Hey, would you like to, does your system allow for me to like donate my record or actually get money for my record for somebody who's trying to do studies and those kind of things.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the hardest part of all of this is collection. ownership starts with collecting. You don't own something until you actually can collect it, right? So you collect it, you own it, and then you share it on your terms, right? That's number one. Number two, and number three, collect, own, and share.

But more importantly, you know, . We can advance discovery and research and, um, push, you know, advancements in medical science through various different ways on recruitment and clinical trials. And you're gonna see some very exciting announcements around that actually tomorrow. I was gonna say, do you have any announcements?

We do. We have a special announcement tomorrow. And we're gonna leave it for tomorrow so that everyone can tune in. , you're, you're, you're killing me. Alright, so, uh, so you had me at, hello. So I do have my records all over the place. Yep. So do I, like, go to your website, sign up, tell you what health systems, and you start collecting the Yeah.

So we, again, we're not direct to consumer, we're B two B, however, we have given special invite codes to chronically ill patients in . You know, there's been lots of, um, uh, so your feedback, people that shared their data and how we've actually saved a life or two on the cancer use cases size. But if, uh, if a, if a patient wants to utilize it.

We're happy to hear their story and help them. There's a lot of healthy individuals that contact us. We get contacted daily by dozens of people that want to try the system. However, we're in super advanced discussions with some, you know, um, big enterprises, and we built the mint.com interface of health data where, uh, patients, members,

Users can collect their data in one place, but our business model is the salesforce.com of healthcare. So who, which people would license that. So who are your clients then? Yeah, so our clients are the three Ps, payers, providers, and pharma. Okay. And, and there's a fourth. The fourth is some big consumer. Uh, I call 'em consumer brands , um, without being specific, but consumer companies that want to get into healthcare and understand this kind of technology can traject them into healthcare.

Or, you know, maybe they've, you know, acquired a company or two in healthcare and they can't really connect the dots. Seek secure really connects the dots for healthcare. So we talked about security, let's talk about privacy. So, yep. Um, so you start aggregating my data. You, you do it. We don't do it. So you aggregate your own data with the intel inside.

Okay. But if you're working with pharma, does my data automatically go to pharma or do I get the opportunity? Yeah, so how that works, let's say we're working with a, b, c pharmaceutical company and they have a thousand person trial. For a, you know, X, Y, Z study on a specific disease. Yeah. And you are in that trial that AB, C Pharma would actually license our Sester research portal that we built with Boston University, the SRP, for them to actually launch it to those thousand participants.

Those thousand participants. If Bill was one of those participants or your family members, you collect. Your data, you agree to the consents of the ABC pharmaceutical company. You share that data. In the data sharing environment that we created, the PIs in the pharma company will go ahead and, you know, review your data with the cohort and you know, something that would take.

You know, several millions of dollars and maybe several years, we can actually accelerate in less than a month for pharmaceutical companies. One of the things I'd be excited about, and I don't know where you're at on this, is, alright, so I have all this data, I even have my family data. It would be really interesting to bring all that together.

And, uh, to do a family research research on our family. What are we absolutely, what are we prone to? And those kind of things. Uh, I mean, there's so many people that want to do that actually. And I believe, you know what's so funny? You don't need to be a physician or a scientist to change science or to change healthcare.

I really believe this. It's all about actually having all your health data in one place. Because once we have our health data in one place, we are empowered as individuals to take action. Yeah. And that's what's so important. That's what's missing in the whole industry. That's what's missing all around the world.

Well, what you're saying right now is exactly what Sima Verma Iss gonna say when she gets up there. Now she's going about it a little different. She's essentially saying, Hey, we're gonna free the data. And, and enable this, uh, market to really start to interact with this data and whatnot. But yep, I'm a big fan of SEMA Verma, and I think what she's trying to push on person-centric interoperability, is actually what Seester built.

Fantastic. Not the blue button, but the green button. Green button. I call it the green button. Sester, S-E-Q-S-T-E-R. Welcome to Fabulous Sester. Come talk to us at the health conference. I, you look, you look really hip in those kind of things, but the reality is you just got off an airplane. So I just got off an airplane off a red eye.

I'm a little tired, but you know, I still got some gas in me. You really do. Hey, thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate the time. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation. If you would like to recommend a guest or someone to be on the show, you can do that from our homepage. Uh, recommend a guest is about three quarters of the way.

Down on the homepage. Please check that out. And don't forget to please come back every Friday for more great interviews with influencers. And don't forget, every Tuesday we take a look at the news, which is impacting health. It. This show is a production of this week in Health It for more great content, you can check out our website this week, health.com, or the YouTube channel, which you can get to from our homepage as well.

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