Episode #597: Alexander Tsiaras Explains StoryMD and the Power of Owning Your Medical Data

0:01 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks nyc. I have the pleasure of bringing Alex Siaris, Story MD Recovering from COVID He's gonna be okay. He's gonna talk about the digital health platform that he has created and some interesting stops along your journey as well. Good to see you. Hey, good to see you as well, Pete. Yeah. It's been a long journey. We've been working on this for years. I was a programmer at DARPA before. I wrote most of the algorithms and code for DARPA to do virtual surgery in preparation for cutting soldiers remotely in robotic pods. And then when the heads of DARPA left DARPA and went to Yale, we had a big grant, and I wrote most of the algorithms and code to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep space flight so they could be cut in robotic pods. So we're visualizing every part of the human body from the moment of conception to advanced age, seeing extraordinary things that, you know, we actually worked with Paul Louderborough. Paul developed a micromagnetic resonance imaging machine to look at the development of the fetus, which no one had ever seen before. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for inventing the mri. And we saw extraordinary stuff. The problem was that we were not moving the dial on behavior. And so we said, you know, if you're going to get people to really understand wellness, chronic disease, these kinds of conditions, it has to be the story of them and not a proxy story.

1:32 So we then pivoted. We raised about $55 million in grants, then we raised another $13 million to just sort of hunker down and build this technology that basically can convert your body and all of your medical information into the story of you and not the statistics of you. And that's basically where we are now. So kind of dig into what that really means. Like, if I'm a. A patient and I'm on a cancer journey, what does that mean to. To have a storyboard? So let me give you a very personal example. My wife, who just had cancer two years ago, she starts off at One Medical, has, you know, her medical files there, ends up at nyu, diagnosed. She's now got the, you know, her sonogram, her pathologies, she's got her mammograms, ships them up to Memoris Sloan Kettering. The oncology side of Memoris Sloan Kettering has one medical record. The surgical side has another medical record. Because she's a tiny person, they were worried the chemo was going to really do a number in her bone, sends her over to the Hospital for special surgery. So within two months, this person has four different medical records. That makes no sense.

2:45 And then she also has pieces of information that are coming. You get a PDF here, you get a screenshot there. Everyone. Pete has a shitty patient journey. Not because they don't love their doctors, not because they don't love the institution. And this is, again, for elite athletes. The problem is everything is fragmented and the individual has to actually cobble it all together. And the whole point is that all of these big electronic medical records and all the technologies are all about billing and administration. No one is actually empowering a great athlete or basically a patient, a cancer patient. They're going through the same thing, fragmentation, where they have to cobble all the information together for themselves. So where's your entry point into this fragmented and disparate information?

3:37 Does it start with the patient logging in and you're like, managing, pulling everything? Yeah, it's totally patient focused. And so the whole point was patients are terribly intimidated by medical information. And so what you have to do is you have to make it very simple for them. So we had raised this huge library, $55 million, visualizing. And so we said, okay, let's code that for a thing called. Are you familiar with HL7? No. HL7 is a coding system. You're fully. You're already completely coded. Every time you go to a doctor and they tell you they want you to get your LDL cholesterol, they're going to give you a drug. Every one of those things are coded. So we have 1.3 million codes of disease, conditions, of drugs, of your vaccines. Everything has to be coded so that they get reimbursed. But at the same time, that code also represents what's going on inside your body. So what you can do is that we built a system where we took the largest medical library in the world and we coded it to this HL7, which is a global system, so that we can actually pull in your medical records and then tell you the story, as opposed to just giving you statistics and allowing it for billing. We said, why don't we turn that into a story that you can understand? It changed my wife's journey completely. And we feel that basically she's in remission, partly because we were proactive, because we finally understood every part of the journey. Gotcha. And then is there a revenue model associated with this for

5:08 the patient? Yeah. The thing is, right now, again, if you're going to actually reduce friction, the biggest friction that you have before you get into the revenue Part you've got to get the, you've got to get them on the system and the, the greatest friction is how do I get my medical records in? So we basically build a system where you can actually import your medical records from 85,000 medical institutions. All wearable data can be immediately brought in and then what happens is that that all gets turned into an AI agent that starts to tell you a story about yourself. It's all free, make it easy to get it in, make it free. And then basically what you do is you can actually make money off of the quality of the data. For good reasons, not for. The problem is what happens in most AI and these other guys is that they basically just rip off your data. What we're looking for is we're sitting here saying if we can actually use this for good, then you can actually make some money off of it and do some good for people. Again, coming back to the importance of data, my wife is a 69 year old, thin white woman who has a young black woman's cancer. So when basically she got it, they didn't know how to treat her. They, so they just gave her like they just said, we're going to give you the most severe cancer because they didn't have enough data on her.

6:19 Data, if it's used responsibly is great. The problem is it's so abused by, by the Silicon Valley. You know, it's, it's like Silicon Valley loves data and hates people. This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away T shirts. What you want to do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions, you are going to get those answers. You're going to be able to target those members and you're going to reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards. You shouldn't be.

7:32 Promotion Vault, your answer, trust me, this is real. So, so who else is taking this, you know, type of. Who's taking this type of approach to really, like the patient journey and putting all this information in the hands of the ultimate user versus saying, hey, I own the data. I'm using it for my own purposes. Seems like everyone owns the data, and I kind of call bullshit on it. Yeah, I mean, what has happened is over the years, no one wanted to go this route because patients, they said patients don't pay. What is happening, though, is that people are paying. People are paying.

8:17 And I mean, take a look at aura. When we met with or a year and a half ago, they were worth one and a half billion dollars. Now they're worth 11. People are paying, you know, and it depends on what they're paying for. So, yes, they will pay, and it just depends on the quality. And because the thing is, if you really think about there, there we have three tiers of businesses. The first tier is who's going to pay out of pocket. And there are six categories of people who pay out of pocket. Women going through ivf, very motivated, paying already pregnant women who want to optimize their pregnancy. And the third one are women who postpartum. So it's just sequential. So we call it the trilogy. Then it's parents of children who have a condition like type 1 diabetes, and they need to manage that child remotely. But there are thousands of these cancers and things that they have to do that they have no tools, or kids who have to manage their parents. Then it's elite athletes who once again are big ticket items, but their information is fractured and fragmented. And then it's pet owners. Those are the six of the categories that will pay out of pocket.

9:23 The second category are the 15% worried. Well, maybe the 10% sitting on the fence. And the third tier of those people are people in crisis. You're going through cancer, and you may be going to adopt it episodically, but you're talking about hundreds of millions of people who have nothing right now. And it's a little bit Pete, like what happened with Steve Jobs in 1984. What he did is he recognized it was an inarticulated frustration that you owned by the mainframe. IBM owned you. You know, basically the IRS owned you. And all of a sudden with Macintosh, you could own yourself. There's an inarticulated frustration that everybody owns your medical information and your medical journey, and you have no control over the insurance companies owning. Everybody owns you. And there's this kind of.

10:06 You're starting to see this movement. So I would say that five years ago we were too early, but now the time has come where people basically want to own and understand and travel and not have to sort of like beg people to get, you know, stupid medical records from the past. Got it. So help me understand. So we're going to empower the patient with all their medical records. And then you've also got 50,000 videos, 75,000 images. Yeah. Is that part of the platform? Is that like a. Is that helping someone go through, whether it's a recovery or they have a session and they're. They're trying to figure out what's going to happen during that session or that therapy? Yeah, it's. It's one of the things that we recognize that people will be proactive if you basically engage them. It's one of the problems people have with clinical trials. They feel like they're guinea pigs. You've got to get them involved.

11:01 You got to get them to feel like they're a part of the process. In order to do that, you have to empower them with sort of like a little bit of vanity. Here's what's happening inside your body. All these characters that are going on are almost like characters in a play. And what you're trying to do is give them an understanding of what's going on in the body and that you can actually maneuver how this play is going to play itself out. We took one guy a couple of years ago, he was with the Grateful Dead, and we took him. We put him in Canyon Ranch for four months, the first week of every month for four months. And what we did is we actually measured all his biomarkers, and within three. Within four months, we reversed his biomarkers for four by three decades. It's all because he was being explained what was going on inside his body.

11:44 He was being proactive in taking care of his body. It is amazing how much control you have over your own body, if in essence, you understand, are motivated. So you've raised a lot of money from grants and also some private capital. Yeah. In order to get this company to the next level, does it become a consumer brand that you have to build or is there a partner or channel? Partners, yeah. Now it's time to partner with other people. So we took a completely different route. We had, because we get the $55 million in grants to visualize all the body and to create the huge library. The second part was to create the technology that could actually turn all of this content into a story that could actually map you globally no matter where you are. Because this HL7 that I was mentioning is not just in the US it's global. So we're sitting here saying if we can become the principal way that everyone understands and manages their well being going forward, then fundamentally you've got a trillion dollar business. So what we did is we just hunkered down.

12:44 We didn't create a business, we created basically a think tank and spend $13 million on building this. Now we just started commercialization and already companies are coming to us to say really, we really want to. Basically we can use you for clinical trials. We can use talking to some of these big companies that are wearing the wear, making the wearables and others are coming and saying we could use this for elite athletes, we can use this. So basically companies are coming to us now. And so what we're going to do is partner with these companies, teaching partnerships with them to basically scale the company significantly. Smart. Smart. So where's the company based? How many employees do you have? We're in New York City, we're in Brooklyn and, but basically, you know, our, our content team is in Toronto. Our, our one engineering, our AI team is in Moldova, our another engineering team is in Bulgaria. And then we have a bunch of people in New York. So we're all over the place. Gotcha. And what are some of the.

13:44 How do you kind of remind yourself that you're making progress at the same time, know that this is, you know, a big undertaking and you know, decades to get to from point A to point B? Well, it's often what happens is that you'll just get up in the morning, all of a sudden you'll start getting some emails from some very powerful people who are sitting here saying, we've been watching what you guys have been doing for a while. We didn't quite understand until recently, but let's have a conversation. Because the thing is that we feel that we can elevate the knowledge of our, of our patients and also create a kind of a stickiness that we've not been able to create with all your technology.

14:25 People really want to understand what's going on inside themselves. And again, it's not, we're not naive. But if you do 15 to 25% of the population, you're still talking about 65 to 80 million people in the U.S. that's the same in Europe, that's the same in Asia. So you're talking about hundreds of millions of people globally that have nothing. Mm, incredible. Talk a little bit about if I get onboarded. Yeah, right. Is it, is There any like telehealth, you know, component to this or it's basically all, you know, I could actually set up my journey and program it as it pulls in different situations or therapies that I'm getting done or surgeries. It's kind of like AI. Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. The thing is that the AI agent, what we're trying to do is make the AI agent your primary care.

15:27 When we first started this, Pete, we thought we would be the support system for the 364 days that you're not in front of your primary care. But over the years that we've been building, this primary care is just disappearing. And it's not just the us, it's everywhere. And so we're realizing the fact that this can become primary care in your pocket. So our AI agent, every time you ask it a question, it will review all of your medical information and give you an answer in relationship to your medical files. It's like having a primary care in your pocket. And what we're doing is we're partnering. So for example, we just partnered, just signed the contract last week with Maiden Lane Medical. Maiden Lane Medical is the largest medical practice in New York City for women's health. And they're now expanding out to maternal health with another group and they're expanding by basically building the largest telehealth system for women in the United States. So basically they're using Story MD for their front end to basically allow all these women to really understand what's going on from menopause to pregnancy.

16:26 So, you know, Chat GBT has become, you know, somewhat of a primary care or answers for a lot of people these days and some of these other AI platforms. So how do, how do you differentiate between what, what knowledge and depth and content you have and how does that not get on these other platforms that are scraping information? You know the problem with ChatGPT and the others, they're brilliant, but the problem is that they do not know you. They know what you're asking them. But you have to have, I mean, this is also one of the problems of AI being over promised by a lot of these wearables. You can't only get 5, 10 biomarkers, you have to get everything. You have to have all the clinical history of the patient, you have to have all the wearable data, you have to have the moods, you have to have their images and then you could function as a AI agent.

17:22 So since we have all the data in this knowledge base that basically that the patient is guaranteed to be told A story about themselves. ChatGPT can't do that. Gotcha. So how many, you know, you mentioned that your wife basically like was, was your was using the platform to get through her, her cancer treatments. Now she's perfectly fine. But one of the interesting things that she did, which was important for us, she went to the doctor when she was finally recovered and they kept on talking to her about survival. And she said, I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. And so she wanted to go to the gyms and wellness. It's not just for the people who want to go to the gym to be well. It's also for these people who want to recover and be vital again.

18:19 This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called higher dose higherdose.com they are the leader in workout recovery products. Infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You got to get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market. Having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for 200 bucks per month where they're paying 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery. If we are already an authority in workouts, Higher dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy, healthy and sweating. And the recovery should be just as good as the workout.

19:30 So in closing here, what's been the biggest surprise or something that's happened that you're like, wow, like I'm glad I did this, just like or an aha moment along the entrepreneurial journey. The the one thing that we finally realized at the end is and again, this comes in Silicon Valley is interested in your data. It's story that gives a soul to your data. And the story is the empowering element. All right. I love it. All right, Story md, You heard it here first on Halo Talks. It will be in your pocket and helping you get through all of life's journeys, challenges, and then to optimize and thrive. All right, good to have you on, man. Thanks very much.

20:34 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks. Your captain speaking. I am the founder and managing partner at Integrity Square. We've been around now for 15 and 1/2 years we have been helping people like yourselves get capital, do mergers and acquisitions, consulting strategic advice in the health, active lifestyle and outdoor halo sector, trying to help as many entrepreneurs as possible get to the next level, take that inflection point and be the force behind your growth. We are helping companies that have at least $3 million of EBITDA, around $10 million of revenue, and we are positioned to help get institutional growth, growth capital, or to negotiate deals with strategic partners. If you go to integritysq.com isq you can see our capabilities. Deck Happy to set up a consultation at any time that is free of charge and we look forward to helping solve obesity, loneliness and diabetes and go Halo.

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