 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. Hello everyone, welcome to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico with theCUBE on the ground for extensive two days of coverage for Blockchain Unbound in Puerto Rico, where all the action is all that's a global conference where investors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders are all coming together to check out the future and set the agenda for Blockchain cryptocurrency and a decentralized internet. My next guest is John Hardigan, executive vice president in Tiva Health. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So we were talking yesterday with, you know, Hashgraph, CTO, you guys are part of that ecosystem. You guys do some interesting things with health. Take a minute to explain what you guys are working on, your value proposition. Sure, so in Tiva Health is a career and credential management platform for physicians and all licensed medical professionals. And it streamlines and automates the credential management process that they have to go through every time that they either change positions or take on temporary work. And the Hashgraph integration is allowing us to do instantaneous credential verification. Currently the state of affairs in the granting of privileges at a particular hospital or facility can take literally weeks and in some cases months to complete. It's a very analog process and with our integration with Hashgraph, it will take seconds. So I was watching the New York Times today and I'm gonna show our Wall Street Journal article about verification of work history. This Blockchain is certainly a good example of that but you're now getting it into the more of health. What is the use case? What's the low hanging fruit that you guys are going after with your solution? And how does that evolve and how do you see that evolving? Well, so like I mentioned, the current verification process for the granting of privileges in a hospital setting, it is pretty much unchanged since the 1950s. The internet helps a lot but what you're talking about is somebody getting a credential paper file with 25 or 30 documents and opening the file and picking up the phone and calling and verifying the reputation and provenance of that particular physician. And it's truly a bureaucratic nightmare that's red-taped to the nth degree and so that represents thousands and hundreds of thousands of hours and billions and billions of dollars in waste that could be reallocated to better patient care, for example. The big use case was seeing education, the workplace but now healthcare, obviously a perfect storm for innovation. Healthcare is not known for moving fast. HIPAA regulations in the past couple of decades really put a damper on data sharing for privacy reasons. At that time, it seemed like a good call. Has things like HIPAA, has the cloud computing model opened up new avenues for health because everyone wants great healthcare but the data's stuck in some silo database. That's a problem. What's your reaction to that? So the approach that we're seeing a lot of organizations take is they are attempting to go after the EHRs and the EMRs, the electronic health records for patients. Of course, that is something that needs to be fixed. However, the medical space is truly influenced. The main stakeholders are the physicians. They sit on all the committees. They run all the budgets. They make the policy. So it's imperative that we address the physicians and get their buy-in to any kind of significant change. And what you're seeing now is states as well as other organizations, including the federal medical board, the federal association of medical boards, as well as the state of Illinois, Wyoming's here as a matter of fact representing, and they are all looking at blockchain solutions for this verification problem for the medical space and remaining HIPAA compliant. So how about security? Because hospitals and health care organizations have been really good targets for ransomware. And so we're seeing that, mainly because their IT systems have been kind of ancient in some cases, but they're right in the target of, they don't have a lot of IT support. One of the things about blockchain that makes it interesting is immutability. So is that something that is on the radar? And how does, I mean, not necessarily ransomware. That's one example of many security issues because you got internet of things. A slew of cloud edge technologies that are emerging that open up a surface area for attacks. So what's your thoughts on that? So as you mentioned, the traditional models have been layered on top of each other over time. It's a patchwork situation. And because it's a patchwork situation, there's vulnerabilities all over the place in facilities a lot of times. And besides that, the medical space is probably 10 years behind the times when it comes to technology, maybe five at a minimum. The model that we're using, you mentioned earlier that there's siloed information in these different facilities and hospitals. And that's absolutely true. So all of that information, you have facility A, facility B, facility C, they all have information on one particular provider or physician, but they don't talk to each other. And that information is at different levels of accuracy and timeliness. You mentioned time and date stamps. So our model works where the information follows the provider, okay? It's all built around the provider themselves. And then the individual facilities can tap into that information. And also they can influence the information. They can update it. So everybody will then be talking to each other in an anonymous fashion around the one provider, updating that information and making it the most accurate in the market. And we get away from the old SAS model. Before I dive in here, I'm going to ask you one more thing around as you walk into healthcare providers and in the healthcare industry, you're a different breed. You have blockchain, you got different solution. The conversations that they're having is, let's put a data lake out there. Again, centralized data lake. ISPs are doing that. And we know with cybersecurity, anytime you have centralized data resources, it's just an easier target to hack. So it's clear that centralized is not going to be the ideal architecture. And this entire movement is based on the principles of decentralized data. So what's it like when you go in there? It must be like, do you have like three heads to them or like a Martian or like speaking some foot of foreign language? I mean, what is it like? Are there people receptive to what you talk about? Talk about some of the experiences you had when you walk in the door and knock on the front door and walk in and talk to them. So it is an interesting situation. When I speak with CEOs and when I speak with COOs, they understand that they're vulnerable when it comes to their data. And they understand how expensive it is. If for example, if they have a HIPAA breach, it's $10,000 per occurrence. Now that means if somebody texts patient information to somebody else on a normal phone, that's $10,000 every time that happens, okay? And so if it's a major data breach and a record of files that they have, you know, 50,000 files lost, I mean, it could be a killing, a business killing event under the right circumstances. So I try to educate them about- Do they look at blockchain as a solution there? Are they scratching their heads, kicking in the tires? What's the reaction? They're interested. They don't understand exactly how we can apply blockchain. And we're trying to educate them as to how that is we are capable of doing so. We're explaining about the vast security improvements by decentralizing the information. And they're receptive, they're just reticent because they're very, you know, tend to be more conservative. So as these organizations like the State of Illinois and the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as they start to adopt, the hospitals and facilities are starting to look and oh, say, hey, this is a real thing and there may be a real application here. Talk about your business and your market, you're going after us through healthcare, product specifically in the business model. Where are you guys? How big are you? Are you funded? Are you doing an ICO? How are you using token economics? How is it working? Give us a status on the company. Sure, so we've been in business for approximately two years. We're a funded startup out of Austin, Texas. We were born actually out of a practice management company, which is an important point because a technology company trying to solve this problem would really struggle because there's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of nuance in how the system operates because it is evolved over time. So that gives us a very significant advantage. We have an operating platform that has been out for a little over a year now and we have thousands and thousands of physicians and other licensed medical professionals that use the platform now. Are they paying customers or are they just users? So the model works like this. It's free to the providers. It's also free to the facilities and medical groups. And so we allow that utility for them to use. How we monetize is we have other curated goods and services for the providers along their career journey. So for example, continuing medical education, all providers are required to take so many units a year and we have a very robust online library of CME. And we also have partnerships with medical malpractice organizations. So it's a freemium model. You get them using the platform. Where's tokens fit in? Where does the cryptocurrency fit in? Do you have a token? Is it utility? Obviously it sounds like a utility token. Let me explain the model. Yeah, so we just announced last Friday it's South by Southwest that we are launching a token, a utility token, and it'll go on sale April 19th. And basically how it works is the providers, the physicians will earn tokens by taking actions in the platform that update their data, for example, or if they look for a job on our platform or if they do different tasks in the platform that improve the veracity of their data. And then they will be able to use those tokens to continue medical education courses, travel courses, medical malpractice insurance, a number of different services. So a token to monitor behavior, engage behavior, and then a two-sided marketplace for clearinghouse. How does the token go up in value? So the more we have multiple partners that are involved, so the partners will be also purchasing advertising time or it's a sponsorship model. So they'll be able to sponsor within the platform. So the more partners we bring in, the more providers we have, the value- So suppliers, people who want to reach those guys, so you get the coins, you see who's doing what, you get a vibe on who's active, and then that's a signal to potential people who want to buy coins. Yeah, and when we announced that we were doing this token, we had multiple partners that we have been in business with for the last two years saying we want to end, we want to do this, we want to get involved. And oh, another thing that we're doing with the token, we have an exclusive relationship with the National Osteoporosis Foundation and we put forth to them that we would like to set them up with a crypto wallet so that they can accept donations and then we would also match those donations up to a certain point that they receive in crypto. So we want to help our organizations, our not-for-profits, by facilitating crypto acceptance. So talk about the relationship with Hashgraph. It's two days old, but it's been around for two years. They announced a couple of days ago, got good feedback, a lot of developers using it. It's not Ethereum, but that's compatibility with Ethereum. You're betting on that platform, how long did it work with these guys and why the bet on Hashgraph? So we were looking at blockchain technologies about two years ago because we realized, as you mentioned earlier, the security issues we have, we have to be very aware of the type of data that we're holding. So at the time though, there were significant issues with speed, significant issues with storage and how it would work by actually putting a credential packet into blockchain. And the technology frankly just wasn't there. And so we started looking for alternatives and thankfully we were in Texas and we happened to run into Hashgraph. And they explained what they were doing and we thought this must be too good to be true. It checked off all of our boxes and we had multiple conversations about how we would actually execute an integration into our current platform with Hashgraph. So we've been in talks with them for I think a little over five or six months and we will actually, it looks like it's going to be one of the very first applications on the market integrating Hashgraph. It's interesting, they don't really have a blockchain based solution. It's a DAG, a directed acyclic graph model. Did that bother you guys? What was, did that, you don't care? It's plumbing, it doesn't matter? So actually the way that it is established, it has all of the benefits of blockchain and none of the fat and sugar, so to speak. I mean, there are a number of things that they do that blockchains unable to do. You mean performance issues and security. Performance speed is a big one, but also fairness on the date and time stamps because with a verification system you have to prove, you have to be able to prove and show that this date and time stamp is immutable and that it is, has been established in a fair manner. And they have been able to solve that problem where the blockchain model, there is still some question about, if you have some bad actors in there, they can significantly influence the date and time stamps. And that was very significant for our model. All right, well congratulations. What's next for the company? What are you guys doing? What's the plan? What's the team like? We're excited, obviously. What's next? So we are going to be announcing some very big partnerships that we've established here late spring. I was hoping to do it here now. However, we've not... Come on, break it out there. I would like to, but I have to be careful. So we have some big partnerships we're going to be announcing and of course we have the token sale coming up. So there's the big question. When's that sale happening? So it starts April 19th and it'll run for about six weeks. What's the hard cap on SoftCap? Yeah, we prefer not to talk about that but let's say SoftCap about 12 million and we have some interested parties that want to do more. And so we're looking at what our best options are as far as setting the value to the token and what the partnerships that are going to significantly impact it will be. Well, great job. Congratulations. You know, one of the big concerns in this market is scams versus legit. You're starting to see clearly that this is a year flight to quality where real businesses are tokenizing for real reasons to scale, provide value. You guys are a great example of that. Thanks for sharing that information. We're really excited and it's very exciting to bring this to the healthcare space, which is, as we said, conservative and somewhat traditional. And we believe that we will be setting the standard moving forward for primary source verification. And you can just summarize the main problem that you saw. Yeah, it is that analog primary source verification of the credential documents. And when our platform goes live, we will literally be putting hours of time, say something like eight hours, back into the provider's lives and back to the money associated with that, back in their pockets, which we hope translates into better patient care. So verification trust and they save time. Absolutely. You know, it's always a good thing when you can reduce the steps to do something, save time, make it easy. That's a business model success. Absolutely, and more secure. Yeah. John Addigan hoops with Intiva, executive vice president from Austin, Texas here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE coverage. Day two of two days of live coverage here in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE host. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.