 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the nation's capital, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. Taylor Carroll is here. He's the co-founder of the GameChanger charity and Zot. Taylor, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you. Glad to be here. Keynote yesterday, we got radio views. Let me just set this up. So Zot is a content platform that creates virtual experiences for children, giving them outlet for creativity, intellectual engagement, a lot more. We're going to talk about that. And then GameChanger is the nonprofit. And it's a majority shareholder of the for-profit organization. So that's an interesting business model. Explain, please. Hey, absolutely. We started GameChanger roughly 12 years ago when I at 11 was diagnosed terminal with a rare form of cancer, given roughly two weeks left to live. Thankfully, long two weeks. Totally healthy now, but congratulations. That's awesome. Hey, thank you so much. Yeah. Good to have you with us. Glad to be here. But from those five years I spent in hospital combined with the 20,000 hospital rooms my dad and I have visited on behalf of GameChanger Charity, we saw how much need there was in the patient care space, in the patient engagement space. And those insights led us to first found GameChanger Charity, now a nearly 12 year old 501C3, an international nonprofit. Started as an endeavor in our garage. This year we've taken in over $20 million in donations, 93 cents on every dollar going to the cause. And GameChanger really focuses in on leveraging gaming technology and innovation to support patients' rights to play, learn and socialize. And we do that through virtual reality, through augmented reality, through custom gaming solutions, through character-based scholarships to support post-hospital dreams. And then with GameChanger Days, where we go in and we bring in bundles of toys for the patients and a catered meal for staff to sit down, to talk with them and to learn about the bespoke gaming and tech solutions we can make to support each individual hospital's needs. So that's GameChanger. And then from that insight, from all that time in the hospital, something we really saw was that the strict patient engagement, how patients watch TV or get clinical health content was so broken. It's one TV mounted on the wall with 20 channels of basic cable. We saw it could be so much better. So we made Zot, which is a device agnostic, cloud-based content distribution system. So now through Zot, from participating hospitals, any patient, any family member can get their own content, their own experiences from any device. A laptop, a tablet, a phone, everywhere in the hospital. So linear TV, gaming, clinical health content, even custom live streams, exclusively for the patients. And Zot is owned in entirety by GameChanger Charity. So anything good that happens to Zot goes back to support the GameChanger costs. So completely changing the experience for the patient from first hand. What's been some of the outcomes, just in either anecdotally or I don't know if you have any kind of measurements or you're changing the world, but if you could share with us how and any examples, that would be great. Now thank you for saying that one of the most profound things we've seen at GameChanger Charity and at Zot is how deleterious boredom is for the patient experience. Understandably, individuals are locked in a boring white room for a day, a week, a month, years at times. Craving visitors, anything. Any form of interaction or social engagement. And something we've seen is that boredom often magnifies pain and anxiety, isolation, overuse of pain medication. And understanding that issue, that pain, something we've been able to do is incorporate custom VR rigs. Custom VR experiences for distraction therapy. So that's where we'll go in, meet with patients and bring the care providers VR sets. So when a patient is getting ready for a surgery, they can put on a VR rig, try tranquil experience. And we've seen pain scores go down by as much as six points on a 10 point pain scale as a result of such distraction therapy. That's fantastic. Thank you. Fascinating, really powerful the discussion we had in the keynote. So making this happen, there's some technology behind the scene, maybe walk us through a little bit. What's the connection with the cloud discussion? Absolutely, absolutely. Something we've seen in growing from a garage endeavor to now an international organization that supports 11 countries, $20 million in revenue this year is the importance of scalability. And being able to one, help as many patients as possible while still focusing on the individual and never losing sight of the fact that each patient we work with is an individual life and truly a family impacted by acute or prolonged illnesses. So what the cloud has really allowed us to do is to magnify our efforts and to take it from say five hospitals to now over a hundred. And one example of that would be in how we use AWS's Sumerian. So that is a cloud based VR experience. And rather than needing to download really content heavy VR experiences on say a gaming computer in order to facilitate these experiences now care providers can interact with them through the cloud and go beyond that they can actually customize VR experiences for the needs of each patient. So let's say there's a patient who needs to get a tour through their new hospital ward. Thanks to creating templates on Amazon Sumerian, GameChanger creating them, these care specialists now can go in and customize the script that that AR or VR host will speak to include the patient's name or to say, I know this is a big change from California or from Colorado or wherever they hail from really making that otherwise generic hospital integration experience feels so bespoke, so personalized to the individual. And if I remember right, one of the things that you can do is actually get them engaged with their care. Like here's the surgery going to take you inside what's going to be. And I've heard studies of this that you understand what's going to be doing and could focus on it. It's just the kind of the power of understanding and thinking on it can actually improve the results that you get out of it. You are so right. That has been one of the most profound things for me personally. When I was sick, I was in the hospital for five years and for roughly six months of those five years, I was in an isolation unit where the only person that could come in was my doctor, my nurse on a hazmat suit. And during that time, I was scared. I was an 11 year old boy, didn't understand what was happening. And I felt an utter loss of agency, another loss of empowerment regarding my illness and more importantly, my healing. So what we're able to do now with Sumerian is we created a collaborative learning experience between CS Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Children's Hospital Colorado in Denver. So experts 1200 miles apart, we're able to collaborate in real time through the cloud, through Amazon Sumerian to make a VR experience where patients about to receive aortic valve replacements could actually go through human hearts in virtual reality and simulate the surgery that they would soon be receiving, leading to this huge spike in empowerment and identity and ownership over their healing. That's amazing. I mean, I remember I've only had surgery once, I've been really lucky, but when the surgeon explained to me how it worked, it just opened up my mind and it made me feel so much more comfortable when I understood that. Being able to visualize that has to be a complete game changer. Taylor, what does the hospital have to do? Take us through their infrastructure needs or how do hospitals get onboarded? It's a fantastic question. An anecdote or a saying that we always hold on to near and dear to our heart at Game Changer and at Zot is that when you know one hospital, you know one hospital. And we mean that in a sense that every hospital is its own behemoth, its own ecosystem that has spent the past one, five, 10, 50 years building what is now an incredibly outdated technology stack. So purely from the patient engagement side, let's say looking at Zot, traditional engagement just to get that TV on the wall and to get the cable going and the basic clinical health information, there's a satellite on the roof. There are server racks in the basement. There's a TV with a computer mounted on the back. There's a laptop in the waiting room. It's just everything is so cumbersome, so outdated. And what we've been able to do is take this really thin client-based cloud approach where we're able to create a bespoke cloud solution that totally bypasses all of that heavy technology stack. Equally, because Amazon and AWS services are so modifiable and you can really pick and choose what you need from the suite, we've been able to go in and instead of have the hospital change to us, we've been able to modify to the hospital to fit into their ecosystem rather than bring in a bulldozer and try and change everything that they have. Awesome, so you can utilize their existing infrastructure and you'll bring in a lightweight, both cloud and thin client infrastructure and be up and running. Absolutely, a metric that we have to speak to the groundbreaking nature of what we're able to do now is typical patient engagement systems can take up to 18 months to install. Cost millions of dollars be incredibly cumbersome and expensive in terms of hours it takes to maintain the hardware. Zot, our technology when we bring it in goes live in hospitals in as little as 15 minutes. And not millions and millions of dollars? Exponentially less. So okay, so the hospital has to buy into it. They really don't have to bring in any new infrastructure. You guys kind of turnkey that for them. So you really need a champion inside the hospital and a go. Absolutely, absolutely. And a mindfulness we really maintain as we're in the hospital is that each hospital decision makers priority is to safeguard the individual patient and their families. We understand that there's sensitivity, there's a lot of security requirements and one of the beauties of working with AWS as you all know is AWS is HIPAA compliant. And in working with AWS, we've been able to add an extra degree of security and safeguarding for any information we collect, any experience we work with the hospitals so that everyone is safe, that all decision makers feel like their needs and requirements are being satisfied and safeguarded. Does that mean the kids can't play Fortnite? Fortnite, neither Fortnite nor PUBG. Because if they were playing Fortnite, you'd never get them home. Same with PUBG. One thing that is pretty fun is through Zot and through GameChanger, all of our relationships with all of the big game developers around the world is we may not have PUBG, but we do have Steam integration and through our game developers, we have over a million dollars worth of Steam codes continually replenished so patients and their siblings can download a 20, 30, 40, 50 dollar game, keep it on their laptop, on their tablet, take it with them and then leave. As a gift for their strength while they were in the hospital. Amazing. Taylor, thanks so much for the contribution you're making to the children and to the world. A really phenomenal story. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you both so much for letting us be here and for sharing our story. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from AWS Public Sector Summit. Stay right there.