Team

Sean Ahrens is a careered, award-winning patient-facing health technologist with over 10 years in software development, with over six years exclusively spent designing, developing, and managing software teams to build patient-facing health applications.

A patient with Crohn's Disease, Sean designed and developed Crohnology.com, a web app that enables patients with Crohn's & Colitis to contribute their daily health data from living with their condition to greater global knowledge. In 2014, Crohnology, in a partnership with the CCFA (Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America), received funding from PCORI to connect Crohnology to PCORNet, a global network that allows researchers to study patient-contributed health data.

In 2014, Sean was the recipient of PCORI's $100,000 Research-Matchmaking Grand Prize for designing, developing, and launching PatientPowered.us, a mobile and web application that enables patients to democratically propose and vote on research topics they want investigated, and for researchers interested in performing this research to find and collaborate with patients interested in contributing to studies that attempt to answer those research questions.

In 2014, Sean directed the development of the OpenPPRN, an open-source software collaboration that enables the any patient advocacy group to deploy a Patient-Powered Research Network for their condition online. In 2011, Sean and a team won first place in the Health 2.0 Novartis hack-a-thon, by building an app that encouraged medication adherence for senior citizens. Sean consults for Genentech, helping them design more patient-centric clinical trials, and has done work with 23andMe to help advance their research initiatives. Sean is the subject of two upcoming documentary films on patient-centered medicine: WANTED: Crohn's End, and In Their Own Hands.

Sean is an alum of the Rock Health health startup accelerator and Y-Combinator. Sean studied Computer Science and Business at UC Berkeley.

John Beck is a full stack engineer who has been creating iPhone apps since 2011. Most recently he has been working on a telemedicine product called Firstline. Firstline offers a subscription service that enables patients to speak with one of 20 physician assistants at any time of the day to receive medical advice. Patients can even receive prescriptions through the app when necessary.

Previously, John worked with ThredUP, a consignment clothing startup for two years. During his time at thredUP, the app saw significant increases in downloads and revenue, and was featured many times in the Lifestyle category. ThredUP continues to be a well loved clothing app, and is consistently rated highly on the app store.

Hikarus Guijarro-Fayard is an experienced software engineer who has most recently focused working with Apple's Swift technology to more rapidly bring iphone apps to publication than ever before. Hikarus studied at Saint Louis University, and now develops software applications from San Francisco.

Christopher Bowns, from LineBreak, is an iOS developer specializing in user experience and product design. He’s worked in the San Francisco Bay Area as an independent consultant for three and a half years. He worked at Apple on iOS and Mac software and has seven years of industry experience.

Dominic Dagradi, from LineBreak, is a user experience expert, front-end and back-end engineer who previously worked at Heroku and Bearded. Dominic has three years of client-facing experience and six years of industry experience.