 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage virtually of the AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit online. Normally we're face-to-face in Bahrain or Asia Pacific or even down in New Zealand and Australia, but we have to do it remotely. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here with a great guest, Ian McCray, founder and CEO of Orion Health, talking about the global healthcare industry with cloud technology because now more than ever, we all know what it looks like before COVID and after COVID is upending the healthcare business. We're seeing it play out in real time. A lot of great benefits to technology. Ian, thank you for coming remotely from New Zealand and we're here in Palo Alto, California. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for the invitation. We're the founder and CEO of Orion Health, global award-winning provider of healthcare technology, sports and delivery of optimized healthcare throughout New Zealand, but now more than ever around the world, congratulations. But now COVID has hit. What is the impact of COVID? Because this is changing healthcare for the better in speed, agility. Is the services up to snuff? Is it up to par? What is the situation of post COVID or current COVID and then what will post COVID look like for healthcare? What's your opinion, Ian? So I've never seen such a dramatic change in such a short time as this happened over the last nine to 10 months. And what we're seeing is before COVID, a lot of focus on automating hospitals, probably primary care, et cetera. Now all the focus is on putting medical records together, digital front doors giving patients access to their medical records in much of the same ways you have access to your bank records. When you travel, you go into, well, we don't travel now actually. But when you go into the lounges, the airline apps, very, very user-friendly. And the healthcare sector has been a laggard in this area. That's all about the change. And patients will be wanting, they don't want to go when they're feeling ill, they don't want to go down to their local physician practice because, well, there are other sick people there. They want to get the right care at the right time in the right place. And usually when they're not putting well, they want to go online, probably symptom checking. If they need to have a consult, they would like to do it there and there, not two or three days later. And they'd like to do it virtually. And there are definitely certain, some things that can be done remotely. And that's what people want. One of the things that comes up in all my interviews around innovation and certainly around AWS and cloud is the speed of innovation. And we were talking before we came on camera about I'm in Palo Alto, California, you're in Auckland, New Zealand. I don't have to fly there, although I'd love to be quarantined for 14 days in New Zealand. Summer's coming, but we can get remote services. We're talking and sharing knowledge right now. And we were also talking before we went on about how healthcare is taking a trajectory similar to the financial industry. You saw our ATM machines. What an innovation, self-service. Then you got apps. And then the rest is history, just connect the dots. The same kind of thing is happening in healthcare. Can you share your vision of how you see this playing out? Why is it so successful? What are some of the things that need to be worked on and how does cloud bring it all together? Just on the banking front, I haven't been to the bank for many years because I just do it all online. I had to go to the bank the other day it was a novel experience. But you know, I have a lot of, when I discuss with our developers and they say, well, what are the requirements? I say, well, hold on, you're a patient. You know what you want. You want your medical record pulled together, right? You want everything there. You can have easy access to it. Perhaps you might like the computer to make some suggestions to you. It may want to give you warnings and alerts. And you know, what we're also getting is a lot more data. Historically, a medical record will be your lab, your radiology, your pharmacy, a few procedures maybe. But what we're getting now is genomic data getting added to it, social determinants. Where do you live? Where do you work? Behavioral, lots of other things are getting added into the medical record. And it is going to get big. Actually, I forgot device data as well. All sorts of data. Now, within that vast amount of data, there will be signals that can be picked up not by humans, but by machine learning. And we need to make the right suggestions, give them back to the patients themselves or their circle of care, be it their doctors, physicians, or maybe their family. So what I'm, the picture I'm trying to paint here is health is going to, historically, it's been all seated around physicians at hospitals, and it's all about the change. And it's going to happen quickly. You know, normally health is very slow. It's a laggard, it takes forever to change. What we're seeing right across the world, I'm talking from Europe, Middle East, Asia, North America, right across the world, the big health systems are looking to provide far more, far richer services to their populations. Big joke in Silicon Valley used to be about a decade ago when big data was hitting the scene. We have the smartest data engineers working on how to make an ad be placed next to, for you and on a page. Which in concept is actually technically a challenge. You know, getting the right contextual, relevant piece of information in front of you. It's, I guess it's smart. But if you take that construct to say medicine, you have precision needs, you also have contextual needs. So if I need to get a physician, why not do virtually? If I get me faster care, I got knowledge based system behind it, but if I want precision, I then can come in and it's much efficient, much more efficient. Can you share how the data, because machine learning is a big part of it, and machine learning is a consumer of data too. Not just users, you're consuming data, but the results are still the same. How are you seeing that translate into value? I think the first thing is that if you can treat patients earlier, more accurately, you can ultimately keep them healthier and using less health resources. And, you know, you notice around the world, different health systems take a different approach. The most interesting approach we see is when a payer also happens to own the hospitals, their approach changes dramatically. They start pouring a lot of money into primary care, so they have to have less hospital beds. But, you know, with data information, you can be more precise in the way you treat the patient. So I've had my genome done probably quite a few times. Actually, I just wanted to compare the different providers. So I have a variant called CYP2C19. I'm pretty sure I've got it right. And that means I hyper metabolize certain drugs. So you give them to me, they won't work. And so there is information in our medical records with machine learning. If you can keep a Tesla on the road, we must be able to use the same. In fact, we are. We have a very big machine learning project here in this company. And to not only get the information out of the medical records, but serve it back up. This is the hard part. Serve it back up to the providers and to the patients in a meaningful, useful way. In an actionable way. Not too much, not too little. That's usually the challenge, actually. Your customer and your business. You guys are in New Zealand, but it's global. You have a global footprint. How are you leveraging cloud technology to address your customers? It's usually useful because we end up with one target platform that, so when we come to deploy in any part of the world, it's the same platform. And from a security point of view, if we're trying to secure all these on-prem installations, it's very, very hard. So we have a lot of security features that are provided for us. There are lots of infrastructure, tooling, deployment, monitoring, all the stuff is just inherent within the cloud. And I guess what's most important is we have a standard platform that we can target right across the world. And you're using Amazon web services. I mean, I'd imagine as you go outside and look at the edge, as you have to have these secure edge points where you're serving clients, that's important. How are you securing that edge? Well, fortunately for us, as Amazon is increasingly getting right across the world. So there are still some regions which there's still working on, but over time, we would be expecting especially every country in the world to have those sorts of services available. You see the future of healthcare going from your standpoint. I mean, if you had to throw a project out in the future to say, you know, five years from now, where are we on the progress and innovation wave? How do you see that playing out? So in the last 30 years, we've had various waves of innovation in healthcare. I think this pandemic is going to transform healthcare in such a major way, in such a short time. We will see the sector totally transform within two to four years. And the transformation will be just like your bank, your airline or lots of other buying stuff, actually via Amazon, actually. We'll see that sort of transformation of healthcare. We've talked a lot about healthcare historically being patient-centric. It is really not true. Healthcare today, in most parts of the world, has been geared around various healthcare facilities. So the change we're going to see now is it'll be geared around the patients themselves, which is really true to you, pretty exciting. I want to get my genome done. You reminded me, I got to get that done. Find out, hey, you know. I want to know. I want to kind of know in advance, so I can either go down in flames, have a good time or go the long walking. I said, I had the positivity gene, you know. I kind of knew that, hey, I'm a pretty positive individual, you know, so. Yeah. Well, so I'll see when I get my, have to go through that process. But, you know, again, fundamentally, you know, I agree this industry is going to be right for change. Remember the old debates on HIPAA and having silos, and so the data protection was a big part of that business and privacy, that was huge. But one area, I'll get to that in a second, but the one area I want to touch on first is the really important one for everyone around the world is, how does technology help people everywhere get access to healthcare? How do you see that? I mean, I see there's one approach that the government do at all. Some people like that, some people don't, but generally speaking, technology should help you. What's your view on how technology helps us get accessible healthcare? What it means no matter where you live or what you do, most people have access to the internet either via a phone or a computer. And so what you want to be able to do, what we need to do as a society is give everybody access, just like they have access to their banking records, have a similar access to their medical records. And again, you know, the standard features, symptom checking for patients who have chronic conditions, advice, help. Medication charts are really important. The ability to go online and do a tele-consult or the conditions that don't require physical examination be able to message your circle of care. It's basically the automation of healthcare, which sadly has lagged other industries. It is a critical point. You mentioned that earlier, I want to get back on that data and we'll get the privacy right after. You mentioned AI and machine learning. Obviously it's a huge part of it, having data models that are intelligent. I know I've covered Amazon and SageMaker and a bunch of other stuff they're working on. So they're getting smarter and they're doing it by industry, which I think is smart. But I want to ask you about data. I was just having a conversation this morning with a colleague and we're talking about AI and AI and machine learning. They're consumers too. If machines are going to automate humans, which they are, the machines are consuming data. So the machine learning is now a consumer, not just a technology. So when you're consuming data, you got to have a good approach. You guys are doing a lot with data. How should people think about machine learning and data? Because if you believe that machine learning will assist humans, then machines are going to talk to other machines and consume data and create insights, et cetera, and spawn all the systematic effects. How should people think about data who are in healthcare? What's your insight there? Well, the tricky thing with machine learning and healthcare is not so much the algorithms. The algorithms are readily available on Amazon and elsewhere. And the big problem that we have found, and we've been working on this for some time and have a lot of people working on it, the big problem we have is, first of all, a marshaling, getting all the data together, wrangling the data. And then there's a fun part where you run the algorithms and then the next big problem is getting the results back into the clinical workflow. So we spend all our time downstream and downstream, and a bit on the middle, which is a fun bit, takes a very small amount of time. And so it's actually probably the hardest part is getting it back into the clinical workflow. That's the hardest part. Really, it's really cool. You know, I really appreciate what you do. I think this is going to be the beginning of a big wave of innovation. I started with Max Peterson about some areas where they saw thousands and thousands of people being cared that they never would have been cared for virtually with these systems and then cloud. Again, just the beginning, and I think this is a reconfiguration of the health care value chain. Configuration, I mean, pre-COVID, we as a company spend so much time on planes traveling all over the world. I've hardly traveled this year, and we're quite resume and all the other technologies. I've quite enjoyed it to be fair. So, you know, and I think there's a reconfiguration of how our business is done. It's great to have a lot of help, yeah. If I tell my wife I'm coming to New Zealand, I get quarantine for 14 days. That's right. I'm stuck down under. Summertime. Get one of those hotels with a view of the harbor, very nice. Ian, final question, and just close it out here in this segment, because I think this is super important. You mentioned at the top, COVID has upended the health care industry. Remote health is what people want, whether it's for, you know, not being around other sick people, or for convenience, or for just access. This is a game changer. You got eye watches now, just watching Apple discuss some of the new technologies and processors that they have and these things for heartbeat. So, you know how all these signals, this is absolutely gonna be a game changer. Software needs to be written. It has to be software defined. Cloud is gonna be at the center of it. What's your final assessment? Share your parting thoughts. We are definitely in a major reconfiguration of healthcare is going to happen very quickly. I would have thought 24 months, maybe no more than 36. And what we're gonna end up with is a health system just like your bank. And the big challenge for our sector is first of all, the large amounts of data. How do you store it? Where do you store it? And the cloud is an audio place to do it. Then how do you make sense of it? Yeah. You know, how do you give just the right advice to an elderly patient versus a millennial who is very technology aware? So there's lots of innovation and problems to be solved and lots of opportunities I believe for startups and new innovative companies. And so it's interesting times. I think times are sure, you know, it's just so much to do. Great recruitment opportunity, Ryan Health. Thank you for spending the time. Ian McCray, Founder and CEO of Ryan Health, the award-winning provider of health information global based out of New Zealand. Thank you for taking the time to come on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit online. We're not face to face. Normally we'd be in person, but we're doing remotely do the pandemic. Thank you for watching theCUBE.