>> (upbeat electronic music) >> Live, from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> 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 Carol is here. He's the co-founder of the GameChanger charity and ZOTT. Taylor, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Keynote yesterday got rave reviews. Let me just set this up. So, ZOTT is a content platform that creates virtual experiences for children, giving them an outlet for creativity, intellectual engagement, a lot more. We're going to talk about that. And then GameChanger is the non-profit and it's a majority share holder of the for-profit organization. So, that's an interesting business model. >> Thank you. >> Explain, please. >> Absolutely, we started GameChanger roughly twelve years ago, when I, at 11, was diagnosed terminal, with a rare form of cancer, given roughly two weeks left to live, thankfully a long two weeks, totally healthy now. But-- >> Congratulations, that's awesome. >> Hey, thank you so much. >> 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 and the patient engagement space. And those insights led to first found GameChanger charity, now a nearly 12 year old 501(c)(3), an international non-profit. Started an endeavor in our garage. This year, we've taken in over 20 million dollars in donations, 93 cents on every dollar going to the cause. And GameChanger really focuses in on leveraging gaming, technology, and innovation to support patient's 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 ZOTT, which is a device agnostic, cloud-based content distribution system. So, now, through ZOTT, 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 ZOTT is owned in entirety by GameChanger charity. >> That's awesome. >> So anything good that happens to ZOTT, goes back to support the GameChanger cause. >> 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. You're changing the world, but if you could share with us how, and any examples, would be great. >> Thank you for saying that. One of the most profound things we've seen at GameChanger charity and at ZOTT 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 you know something we've seen, is that boredom often magnifies pain and anxiety, isolation, over use 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 a 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. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> It's fascinating, we're really powerful the discussion we had in the keynote. So, making this happen, there's some technology behind this. 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 dollars 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 100. 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 a 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 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, you understand, what's going to be doing and can focus on it, 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 in 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. An utter 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, were 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 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, >> Yeah. >> But when the surgeon explained to me how it worked and just opened up my mind, and made me 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 on-boarded? >> That's a fantastic question. An anecdote or a saying that we always hold on to near and dear to our heart, at GameChanger and at ZOTT, is that when you know one hospital you know one hospital. (laughter) And we mean that in the sense that every hospital is it's own behemoth, it's own ecosystem that has spent the past one, five, ten, 50 years building what is now an incredibly outdated technology stack. So, purely from the patient engagement side, let's say looking at ZOTT, 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 bull dozer and try and change everything that they have. >> Awesome. So you can utilizing their existing infrastructure, and bring in a light-weight 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. ZOTT, our technology, when we bring it in, goes live in hospitals in as little as 15 minutes. >> And not millions and millions of dollars? >> (laughs) Exponentially less. >> Okay, so the hospital has to buy into it, they really don't have to bring in any new infrastructure. You guys kind of turn-key that for them. So really need a champion inside the hospital. And a go. >> Absolutely, absolutely. A mindfulness we really maintain is where in the hospital is that each hospital decision maker's 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, 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. >> So does that mean the kids can't play Fortnite? >> Fortnite (laughs). Neither Fortnite nor PUBG's (laughs). >> Well, because if they're playing Fortnite, you'd never get 'em home. >> (laughs) >> Same with PUBG. >> One thing that is pretty fun is through ZOTT 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 when they 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. Really a phenomenal story. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you both so much for letting us be here and sharing our story. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from AWS Public Sector Summit. Stay right there. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Annette Rippert. She is the Senior Managing Director Accenture Technology, North America. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, I'm happy to be here today. >> So, let's talk a little bit about Accenture's innovation for society initiative. Give our viewers a little background on it. >> Sure. Well, you know, for quite a while we've been known as a company around innovation. But I think one thing that doesn't always come forward is the fact that you know, since our very early days we've had this very tight coupling with corporate citizenship, with philanthropy. In fact we invest 1% of our pre-taxed dollars in philanthropic related initiatives. And you know, for a number of years we've had initiatives like Tech4Good that are part of the DNA of our organization. So, when you think about the innovation side of the organization, and then you think about our philanthropic desires and couple that now with all of the digital technologies, really the possibilities are almost endless when you think about ways that, really, we strive to be able to conquer, not only business problems but societal problems with technology. >> So how do you decide where you're going to focus your energy, your time, your resources. How do you choose the biggest most pressing problems? >> Yes. Well I think one of the things that's really important is we always start with the business process or the societal issue itself as opposed to thinking about how can we use a particular technology to instantiate something we start with really, what's the social problem. And one of the ways that we do this, we have a global innovation contest. Our people get so excited to be apart of this as you could imagine. And one of the tracks is really around Tech4Good and so, teams from around the world think of ways that they can use technology to solve a particular societal issue. And it's really exciting to see the kind of innovations that come out of that. In the end the winners globally are funded to be able to take that idea and actually develop it and put it out in to use. >> So talk about some of the winners and the most exciting entrants from your perspective. >> Well, there's one that I think is maybe a good place to start and that's really around the area of home care, elder care, you know striving to keep a connection together with somebody who's in that circumstance. And being able to provide sort of a real world interaction. So, one of the teams took, with that in mind, concepts around natural language processing, around AI, and really IoT as well. Connecting in sensors in the home, whether that be to doors or to beds or to stoves which can represent safety concerns. And this innovation was built around an Amazon Echo show and around the Amazon platform. And really enables a lot of freedom and a opportunity for the person who's home bound like that to be able to interface with family, with caregivers and really better enable an independent living situation that extends that home care environment. >> So particularly, as the world's population is aging, that's something that we're experiencing here in the US, you can see how that really would help to solve a social challenge. >> Yes, pretty exciting. >> Yeah, so. Talk to me a little bit more about how this contest works in terms of teams within Accenture working together, collaborating and do the self-form the teams? Does Accenture tell them how to ... >> We announce the competition and people self-form it can be an individual, it can be a team. They do this on their own time. They spend time really thinking about how they can apply new concepts. So for us, it's a opportunity for people to learn but then they also think about wanting to address something that's another part of them, you know doing social good. So, it's also an opportunity to contribute and give back through the process of this competition. >> I know that one of the parts of the innovation for social good is the skills to succeed initiative. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that? >> Sure, well this is a program really that has taken off like wildfire and we've been doing it for many, many years and it's targeted with extending technology skills to individuals who come from lesser than means. It's a way of extending skills and capability and coaching to provide them the ability to really re-enter the work force. Re-enter the work force with skills and get on their feet. It's been something, it is pervasive across our business. Most of our people have participated in some way whether through coaching or other initiatives and it's been very successful. >> So you go in to these communities and coach marginalized communities? >> Yes, and then it provides an opportunity for them to be able to re-enter, whether re-enter the work force whether with us or any other organization. We look most to provide them with skills. We also provide them with other things that you don't think about when somebody is trying to re-enter the work force, whether that happens to be clothing or other capability to be able to get back on your feet. >> So let's talk about this moment in time in the technology industry. So we have this explosion of digital technologies, as you were saying, AI and machine learning and big data, data analytics and we have companies sort of coming together saying hey, there are a lot of pressing global challenge, societal challenges. We need to harness these technologies to solve them. I mean, do you think that, can you describe, since you are really on the ground, your boots on the ground in the middle of this, what it's like to be in this environment. Do you think that other companies are sort of following Accenture's lead? How would you describe what's going on? >> Well, I think that for a very long time, as I was mentioning, part of our mission statement as a company is to help the way the world works and lives. And so it's been kind of core to the way that we operate the business in our core values. But I think what's happening now is there's a lot more awareness of social good. And instead of supporting a charity or being a partner together with a charity, now we find ways we can really amplify our ability to make a difference. And that is by leveraging our capability around technology to help take that devotion of time, that interest, and really step it up in a pretty significant way. To bring that technology in a way that really's disruptive to changing the societal issue. >> But at the same time you don't want to necessarily start with the technology itself. You want to make sure you're starting with the problem. >> Well that really comes back to the way that we address business problems and the way we address the societal problems, is all of our people are taught concepts around designed thinking. Around human centered design. And so that concept of starting with what is the human problem, is a very natural course because that's the way that we solve all of our business problems. And so, I think that that's a, in thinking about how we solve those issues or collaborate in order to do that I think really drives a lot more complete answers in fact, to the kind of problems that we look to solve. And that's why starting with the societal issue and really what's at risk. What are we trying to address? And then thinking of creative ways to be disruptive around that. Some cases it's not even around the technology. It's about, you know, thinking in a new way about how to address those issues. >> And a cultural shift and getting people to, yeah exactly, collaborate differently. So I know you've just came from a hackathon and you were helping charities think different, think about a problem they wanted to solve and then think about how we could use technology to solve it. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the hackathon here. >> Sure, well you know, our interest in this area is, you can tell I'm very passionate about it. We invest a lot of time from a corporate standpoint and we're helping to sponsor this hackathon here at AWS re:Invent and we're doing that together with several organizations. For example, Girls Who Code, let me see, GameChanger, Compassion, and Goodwill are all other organizations that are participating in the hackathon. And had really interesting problems that they brought to the table. In fact, one of the problems that we talked about today, that the teams are over hacking away thinking about, is there are many organizations that sponsor very under privileged children and create, in this organization situation, they create a one to one relationship between a sponsor and a child and they were looking for ways to be able to connect those two parties by using natural language processing, they wanted to facilitate a near real time kind of dialogue across the boundaries of language in a way that ensures protection of the child and that there's nothing malicious that could happen through that direct connection. Of course we expect everyone to be well-meaning in that but part of the innovation is also protecting the children too. So the teams are over hacking away looking at this and several other kind of problems, social problems, Tech4Good type of initiatives throughout the day today. >> So at next year's, let's look in to our crystal balls here and think about what we're going to be talking about at next year's AWS Executive Summit. What is on the table for this year and what kinds of things are most exciting you that you're ... >> Well I think all the innovation, just further enables it, the way that we think about how we're using today, artificial intelligence, and you couple that together with so many other things around, whether, the example I just gave, around natural language processing and you couple that together with the societal and business problems that are here. I mean, it's really quite explosive. So you think about all of the new innovation that's being announced this week. I think the opportunity to be able to drive that even deeper into, whether it happens to business or societal problem, will be even more interesting next year. >> We'll end that, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> A really fun conversation. >> Enjoyed it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)