Introduction: Geno.Me is a health data exchange platform that was born from the idea of empowering people to take greater ownership of their health data, because it is a valuable and necessary asset to advance medical research. With a focus on creating better ways to treat populations that have diseases with a genetic predisposition, the organization allows people to democratize their health data in a safe, secure and meaningful way.

What it does: The platform is unique by creating a two-sided ecosystem of organizations and people that rely on the good faith relationships of each other. Not only does the platform cultivate a connection between patients and researchers because of directly consent to be contacted, it aims to provide the most efficient ease of access to comprehensive healthcare profiles for all parties. By aggregating clinical, genetic, and genomic data from Geno.Me’s Contributor Community, it makes it easier for users to have all their health information in one place, in a way that is easily transferable and usable by the organizations that can create significant medical outcomes with this information. In addition, Geno.Me compensates its Contributors, with a recurring payout each time their dataset is purchased.

Inspiration: The project was started in 2021 after a pivot from my first business, after learning about the difficulties of health data accessibility by clinical research organizations. Health system interoperability is a known issue, but with the emergence of the pandemic, this accelerated the direct-to-consumer market for obtaining various types of information. By linking electronic health records (EHRs), genetic and genomic reports, decision-making at the clinical level can be enhanced, positively impacting the health and wellness of patient populations.

Challenges we ran into and overcoming them: There were quite a few challenges from both a commercialization and technical development standpoint. On the business side, gaining traction with the idea of a two sided marketplace for collecting and transmitting health data was the largest challenge. Some of the earliest users weren't sure about the security of their data. We mitigated that by ensuring we have the proper privacy and security audits and certifications - including but not limited to HIPAA, SOC I & II, and bi-annual penetration testing. On the technical side, building the compute engine for the query builder so that researchers can search for records within our database was the most difficult. We made a solution that distributes the query handling to several different servers - which os known as a mapreduce-type algorithm.

What's next for Geno.Me: After showcasing the beta in 2022, and receiving necessary privacy and security certifications in 2023, the platform was made available for public use in Q3 2023. Now in 2024, the team at Geno.Me has continued to cultivate product-market fit, and growth into the target markets of pharmaceutical and clinical research industries. We've gained almost 3000 Contributors and a few paying clients, so we're on our way!

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