>> Announcer: From around the globe,
it's theCUBE with digital coverage
of AWS Public Sector Online,
brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Everyone 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 host of theCUBE,
we've got a great segment here with a great guest,
Ian McCrae, 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,
has upending the health care 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.
>> You're the Founder and CEO of Orion Health global,
award-winning provider of health information technology,
supports the 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 and speed agility,
is the services up to snuff, is it up to par?
What is the situation of the post-COVID or the current COVID
and then what we'll post-COVID look like for healthcare,
what's your opinion?
>> So, sir, I've never seen such a dramatic change
in such a short time, as has happened
over the last nine to 10 months.
And you know 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,
and much of the same way 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 are very, very user friendly
and the healthcare sector has
been a leg out on 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 the sick people there,
they want to get the right care, at the right time,
and the right place.
And usually when they're not feeling 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
and not two or three days later,
and they're like to eventually,
and you know, there are definitely 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 it's been quarantined for 14 days
in New Zealand and summer is coming.
but we can get remote services,
we're talking and sharing knowledge right now.
And when you 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, you know, 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 understood 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 discussed with our developers
and they say, well what are the requirements,
I said, 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,
and historically a medical record will be your lab,
your radiology, your pharmacy, few procedures, maybe,
but what we're getting now is genomic data getting added
to its social determinants, where do you live,
where do you work, behavioral
and lots of other things are getting entered
onto the medical record
and it is going to get big.
Oh, 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 pick the right suggestions
that I give them back to the patients themselves,
or the circle of care, be it their doctors,
physicians, or maybe their family.
So the picture I'm trying to paint here
is health is going to, historically
it's been all seated around physicians and hospitals,
and it's all about to change.
And it's going to happen quickly,
you know normally health is very slow,
it's a leg out it takes forever and forever to change,
what we're seeing right across the world,
I'm talking from Europe, Middle East, Asia,
the North America, right across the world,
the big health systems looking to provide firm
or 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,
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 that gives 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,
'cause 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
and they start pouring a lot of money into primary care
so they have to have less hospital beds,
but, 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 one of the care pair, the different providers
so I have avian called CYP2C19,
I'm pretty sure I've got it right,
and that means I hyper metabolize suite on drugs,
so you give them to me they won't work.
And so there's 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're, we have a very
big machine learning project here on this company,
and to not only get the information
out of the medical records but save it back up,
this is the hard part, save it back up to the providers,
and to the patients in a meaningful useful way,
an actionable way, not too much, not too little
and that's usually the challenge, actually.
>> You're a customer in your business,
and you guys are in New Zealand, but it's global,
you've 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 so when we come to deploy
in any part of the world, it's the same platform.
And you know 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 and monitoring all the stuff
is just inherent within the cloud
and I guess what's most important
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 that 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're you securing that edge?
>> Well, fortunately for us as Amazon
is increasingly getting right across the world
so there are still some regions which,
this tool are working on, but over time,
we would be expecting officially every country
in the world to have all sorts of services available.
>> You see the future of health care going
from your standpoint, I mean, if you had to throw
a projectile 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 Ian, playing out?
>> So, certainly last 30 years,
we've had various ways of innovation on healthcare,
I think this pandemic is going to transform healthcare
in such a major way in such a short time,
and we'll see it 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 have talked a lot about healthcare,
historically being patient centric,
it is really not true, our healthcare today
and most parts of the world has been geared around
the various healthcare facilities,
so this change we're going to see now,
it'll be geared around the patients themselves,
which is really intriguing but exciting.
>> Position, I want to get my genome done,
you've reminded me, I got to get that done.
>> Finding that out, you know, you know---
>> I want to know, (laughs) I want to kind of know in advance,
so I can either go down the planes,
have a good time or low the loam games.
>> I find out I had the positivity gene, you know,
I kind of knew that and you know,
I'm the fairly positive individual, so (laughs).
>> Yeah, well, so as you I'm going to get my,
I've to go through that process.
But you know, again, fundamentally,
you know that I agree this industry
is going to be right for change,
I remember the old debates on HIPAA
and having silos, and so the data protection was
a big part of that business and privacy as a huge,
but one area, I'll get to that in a second,
but the one area I want to touch on first
is that really an important one,
for everyone around the world
is how does technology help people,
everywhere get access to healthcare?
How do you see that unless there's one approach
that the government do it 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 our 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,
you know, symptom checking for patients
who have chronic conditions, advice, help,
medication charts are really important,
the ability to go online and do internet consult
or the conditions that don't require a physical examination,
be able to message your circle of care,
it's basically the automation of healthcare,
which, you know, sadly has legged other industries.
>> It is a critical point, you mentioned that early,
I want to get back on the date
and we'll get to 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 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 hear about AI
and AI and machine learning,
they're consumers too, (chuckles)
so 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 spoil another 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 marshaling,
getting all the data together, wrangling the data,
so and then there's a fun part
where run the algorithms
and then the next big problem
is getting the results back into the clinical workflow.
So we spent all our time upstream and downstream
and a bit in the middle, which is the fun bit,
takes a very small amount of time.
And so it's probably the hardest part
is getting it back into the clinical workflow,
that's the hardest part, really, it's really difficult.
>> You know, I really appreciate what you do,
I think this is going to be the beginning
of a big wave of innovation,
I was talking with Max Peterson about some areas
where they saw, you know, thousands and thousands
of people being cared,
that they never would have been cared for virtually
with the systems and then cloud.
Again, just the beginning, and I think this
is a reconfiguration of the healthcare value chain and---
>> Configuration, I mean, at pre-COVID
we as a company spend so much time on planes,
traveling all over the world,
I've hardly traveled this year and zoom
and all the other technologies,
I've quite enjoyed it to be fair.
So, and I think that there's a reconfiguration
of how business is done,
it's started to happen in healthcare and---
>> If tell my wife, I'm coming to New Zealand,
I get quarantined for 14 days.
>> That's right.
>> Yeah, I'm stuck down under summertime.
>> You get one of those hotels
with the view of the Harbor, very nice.
>> And final question and just close it out here
in the segments, I think this is super important,
you mentioned at the top,
COVID has upended the healthcare industry,
remote health is what people want,
whether it's for, you know,
not to being around other sick people,
or for convenience, or for just access.
This is a game changer, you got iWatches now,
I was just watching Apple discuss
some of the new technologies and processes
that they have in these things for heartbeat,
so, you know how this signals.
This is absolutely going to be a game changer,
software needs to be written,
it has to be so far defined,
cloud is going to be at the center of it.
What's your final assessment,
share your partying thoughts?
>> We are definitely,
in a major reconfiguration of healthcare
that's going to happen very quickly,
I would've thought that 24 months,
maybe no more than 36
and what we're going to 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,
and the cloud is ideal place to do it,
then how do you make sense of it,
you know, how do you give just the right advice
to an elderly patient versus a millennial
who is very technology aware?
So these, 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 time's short, you know,
it's just so much to do,
great recruitment opportunity in Orion Health.
Thank you for spending time,
Ian McCrae, Founder and CEO of Orion health,
an 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 it remotely due to the pandemic,
thank you for watching theCUBE.
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