NEW YORK – Digital health company Seqster said Tuesday that it is partnering with rewards firm Trustr to help pharmaceutical and life sciences clients improve recruitment, engagement, and retention of patients for clinical trials.
San Diego-based Seqster collects individuals' health data from wearables, consumer genetic testing, electronic health records, and social determinants of health, giving users the ability to explore it on their own or share it with others. Customers can also contribute specific health data to research, and caregivers can use the platform to manage their loved ones' medical data in a single portal.
Trustr, a startup based in Burlington, Vermont, adds an incentive layer to recruit patients and get them interested in future clinical trials they might be eligible for. The firm did not specify the types of rewards it would offer to patients on the Seqster platform.
"With data ownership, real-time access, and a longitudinal view of their health coupled with intelligent rewards, patients are able to have a truly improved experience, leading to more efficient and effective clinical trial recruitment, engagement, and retention," Chris Jones, founder of Trustr, said in a statement. "While others are finding ways to disintermediate the patient to access their data, Seqster and Trustr both strongly believe that actively engaging with the patient yields not only better data but also a richer patient journey, even enabling them to readily join future trials when available."
Seqster CEO Ardy Arianpour said that the partnership with Trustr takes away the need for pharma companies to "leave patient engagement and retention to chance." He said that Trustr's technology has been tightly integrated with the Seqster platform. "We now have value-added patient touch points embedded in our platform that should dramatically improve clinical trial retention and medication compliance," he added.
Seqster completed a $12 million Series A funding round in April. A month earlier, it entered into a partnership with drug development data aggregation startup Medable to integrate real-world genomic and phenotypic data for decentralized clinical trials.