Delivering Structured Health Data to the Market | Andrei Pop from Human API

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Andrei Pop 0:00
Whereas my most consumers have no idea. And it’s, you know, it’s buried in these antiquated IT systems that are in, you know, on prem deployments sitting in a basement somewhere and a server that hasn’t been touched in 15 years. It’s you know, there aren’t modern API’s to get to these systems. They’re very fragmented. It’s very healthcare data is an incredibly fragmented.

Alexander Ferguson 0:29
Welcome to UpTech Report. This is our applied tech series UpTech Report is sponsored by TeraLeap. Learn how to leverage the power of video at Teraleap.io. Today, I’m joined by my guests, Andrei Pop, who’s the CEO and founder of Human API. Welcome, Andrei. Good to have you on it. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Alex. Now, Human API started 2014. Recently, guys, the last round you did was a series C, the whole goal, if I understand correctly, is to make structured digital health data available on any consumer in real time. So it’s all around this this term of health data liquidity, okay. In the name itself, Human API, basically, everything around ourselves, letting that data be available for other folks and ourselves, the access of it how we understand, like, take me back, why did you set out to solve this? And what is the problem that you set to solve?

Andrei Pop 1:17
Sure, yeah. So I think, look, there’s a, the healthcare industry, really what Human API is all about is, is trying to empower folks who are innovating in the healthcare space, right, nobody looks at healthcare and thinks that we’re moving at the right pace, you know, everybody wants to be better. And if you start to look at the industry as a whole, you realize that one of the most fundamental problems that it faces is this lack of data liquidity, which is just a fancy way of saying that healthcare data is hard to get make sense of in us. And so what we really set out to build that Human API is this one stop shop, right? This the simple modern transaction layer of healthcare data, so that as a consumer, and it’s really, really critical that the consumer be at the center of this entire experience. That’s why we call it Human API, it’s one of our most important core values. It’s all about how that consumer can share his or her data with places that they find value. So it could be, you know, when they’re buying insurance, when they’re switching employers when they’re enrolling in a clinical trial when they’re checking into their doctor’s office, most recently, as part of the COVID reopening, when they’re demonstrating that they’ve had a negative test result or a vaccine. And it’s all about so what we basically done is we built this network of real time connectivity to what now spans 295 million Americans or so. So most of the country, you know, again, with their consent, of course, and only so with their consent, we’d be able to transact data in real time. And that’s nobody else has done that, right. It’s, it’s literally us. And then, you know, there are fax machines. And that’s how people try to transact data. And so it’s really by bringing that that modern transaction layer to the world that we try to solve that problem, data liquidity, which our whole thesis is, if we do that, then the folks that pick that up to pick up our API’s and build with them, whether they be you know, two guys in a garage working on a startup, or some of the innovation teams with the world’s biggest companies, they’re going to be the ones that push the world forward that push the industry forward.

Alexander Ferguson 3:21
So if I understand correctly, what you’ve done is is the groundwork all the hard work of going to all the data sources, whether their hospitals, their labs, pharmacies, or networks, healthcare, insurance networks, and being able to get the data out of them, make the connections with them, so then an API to a developer that can create something and then as the person, they then can sign up for this app? And then give consent to all their data to come through the app? Am I describing it? Well?

Andrei Pop 3:50
Yeah, you are. I mean, I think the so so absolutely the network that we’ve built. So we’ve done over 40,000 integrations, across the country, labs, hospitals, electronic health record systems, pharmacies, devices, so not a lot of people know, we’ve got a huge device network every every wearable or sensor that you can think of. And the way you find out about Human API is typically through one of our customers products. So we embed our solution, our platform in our customers products. So think of the checkout with PayPal experience for your health data instead of for your money. So you found out about PayPal through eBay, or you know, wherever. And then if it was your first time using it, you said, Oh, what’s this service? Well, I could send a check in the mail, right? That would be slow and boring and terrible. Or there’s this new thing called Pay Pal, let me check it out. Let me sign up. Human API works the same way. So let’s say it’s one of our you know, you’re applying for life insurance, or you’re trying to get a disability claim filed with one of our big insurance customers. And they’ll say, hey, this could take you 468 weeks, or we have this service called human API that you You can sign up and plug in your username and password. And 30 seconds later, we’ve got it all sorted out. So that’s just one example.

Alexander Ferguson 5:06
Yeah, just said that as a consumer, I’m not going to go to an API and just make an account by itself. It’s the idea of I’m signing up for a service or application. And I see the ability to check out your terms to sign in. And then that gives all the data which through your, your network, to that application that I’m going to use.

Andrei Pop 5:25
Yep. So that’s how it starts. Now, what’s really important to understand is that that’s the first time that you hear about or use human API, just like you would with Pay Pal. Now, what you’re going to see is in the future, because we’ve got this massive ecosystem of partners that create value for consumers, human API is increasingly becoming the place that a consumer might, you know, you’re going to discover us through, let’s say, john Hancock at AAA or one of our big clients, or, you know, one of the digital health companies that we work with, like an omata health, for example. But then you’re going to find very quickly that once you’ve connected your health data that that identity in that data persists with you and you know, we store and manage it on your behalf. Again, with your consent, you can always delete it at any time. But if you stay there and kind of keep it with us, like a bank, right, storing your money, there are things that you can do with it to unlock value for yourself. And so those are some of the things that, you know, we’re the ecosystem of partners that we have start to deliver for you,

Alexander Ferguson 6:26
in this whole era of privacy and who owns the data around ourselves is so critical, and something that you put that as a mentality, first of we, as consumers, we own our data, and then we have the right to use it. And what you’re doing is just enabling us to use the data in more ways.

Andrei Pop 6:43
One 100% Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s one of our core tenants. And actually one of our most important values is to serve we called serve the human first. So this idea and this, this plays out in a lot of different ways across our company. But at the center, it’s all about the consumer, it’s all about the human being behind that data. It’s you know, your healthcare data is your most sensitive and most important asset, I would argue even more so than your money, right? Because your money, it’s much more fungible, right, your health care that that’s with you for life. And obviously, it’s so sensitive and critical in so many ways that it is core to our model, we have to take that incredibly seriously. It’s baked into our DNA. And the only way that I believe that you can solve this this challenge in healthcare of this data, typically being illiquid is not by obfuscating the consumer, which is how so many companies try to do it, right, they try to do it without involving the consumer, they try to sell that data to third parties, and sometimes nefarious ways. And our model is ask the consumer to share his or her data and only what the consumer permissions is what will share in doing that you empower that consumer and the business that’s creating value for that consumer.

Alexander Ferguson 7:55
So you would having that mentality first, then what you’ve done is you’ve also opened this up as an API to developers, I bet this is a big opportunity, then for those that are looking to build new applications in the healthcare space. We’re probably one of the hardest things was to get access to the data. Am I correct on that?

Andrei Pop 8:14
Yep. Absolutely. So I think if if you I mean healthcare, interoperability, or lack thereof, right, is one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. Because, you know, we all know that in order to push industries forward, right, we want the entrepreneurs that are building these next generation products to have access to, to data and the users, right. I mean, fundamentally, that’s, that’s what’s holding a lot of this innovation back, and especially when you’re in such a complex industry as healthcare, right? It’s, it’s not, it’s not straightforward to, to just, you know, hang out your shingle and try to try to start a company and suddenly we able to reach, you know, millions. There’s a story I like to tell from and I think it’ll bring home this idea of us being enabler. So are you familiar with Twilio? Yeah. So So there for those that aren’t. So Twilio is a telecommunications API company. And they, you know, they, when they went public, I read their their s one filing. And there were there were about 250 million in revenue at the time, give or take. And there were two companies on there that were disclosed by name in the public filing, because of the substantial contribution to Twilio as revenue that they represented. And those two companies, I think there were about 15% and 7% of the revenue respectively. And they were WhatsApp and Uber. And now here’s what’s really interesting. So Twilio just enabled Uber to send text messages back and forth and WhatsApp the same right? Creating liquidity of communication in that market. Neither of those two companies existed when Twilio was founded. And so the reason that I bring this up is it’s It’s a really good example of, you know, we don’t really know where the future innovations gonna come from. Right? We know that we’re enablers, we’re tool Smith’s, you know, you asked for, or you asked about an API for developers, right? It’s, it’s really great when you can empower teams that are out there solving existing problems, like, hey, I need a, you know, better faster digital fax machine as an API, but the real innovation is going to come from the folks that, you know, where we can’t even imagine what those projects will be. But by enabling that ecosystem, by making that data liquid, you’re encouraging developers that are out there building stuff, to just try things, and you’ve lowered that barrier to entry. So we can push the industry forward as a whole,

Alexander Ferguson 10:45
lowering the barrier to entry for development of new ideas. That’s like the what you see is the future, what you’re, what you’re working on and doing is in when it comes to healthcare applications or opportunities, or new ideas is coming is basically we don’t know what’s coming. But something is because you provided that that liquidity of the data, what a choice, it was worth how we understand for someone be able to use this is it is it just effectively, like any other type of API connection? I mean, what’s it’s like a developer saying, I want to sign up and start using it? What does that process look like?

Andrei Pop 11:21
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, you can go on our website, we’ve got all the all our documentation is public, it’s all open, you can start you know, playing around with it, obviously, we’ve got a, you know, a very engaged sales team that will reach out to you and kind of help you through stuff, solutions consulting, as you’re prototyping or working things out. And we’ve got also a suite of solutions across a number of different markets, right. So I mentioned some of the some of the markets, we play in our insurance, the pharmaceutical value chain. So clinical trial, recruitments, clinical trial screening, we work a lot with digital health, we work a lot with what we call real time health ID. So that’s all of the COVID reopening, but even spanning beyond COVID, right, all of the new solutions that are being tailored directly for consumers in the healthcare space. And so you can just as a developer, you go online, just start playing with it. And typically, there’s, you know, you’ll find that with our SDKs, with our documentation, you can just drop it in and immediately get, you know, this experience where any one of your consumers can say, you know, I’ve got medical records ad on the west coast, Kaiser, let’s say, and I’ve got prescriptions at CVS, and Walgreens. And I’ve got some labs a quest, and I, you know, used to go to UCSF and I own a Fitbit. And we connect to all of those and 40,000 other sources. And so you click that, and 30 seconds later, your data shows up, and it’s normalized. And it all happens in real time. It’s super simple

Alexander Ferguson 12:52
for you. Were you in health care at all before this? Or did you just see the opportunity? Like, how

Unknown Speaker 12:58
did this happen? How

Alexander Ferguson 12:59
does this come together?

Andrei Pop 13:00
Yeah, not not at all. In fact, I came at this very much from from an engineering and a data science background. So I think that the, you know, there’s a, I spent a little bit of time in the quantified self, what’s called the quantified self world, which is really folks that are, you know, into self tracking. So when the first sensors started coming out, you know, I’m one of these guys that gets a blood test every three months, you know, I was an athlete, I super quantified everything. And then, you know, I didn’t really believe that was going to be a market in the near term, at least. But we, when I, when I sold my first company in 2013, we we were working on a product that was a CRM for physiotherapist This was up in in Vancouver, Canada at the time, and we looked at the US market, because the Canadian market was too small for what we were trying to do. And that was when I first got introduced to that. Just what was going on in terms of this, you know, massive availability, every medical records were digitizing, very, very quickly, and new sensors were coming out. So there’s this explosion of the availability of digital health data. And nobody was there to organize it all. And if you look at the history of how markets evolve, and how markets get pushed forward, there tends to be you know, again, whether we talked about Twilio, earlier, right, Twilio, telecommunications, now there’s a company and financial services called plaid that everyone’s really excited about, right? It’s it’s these these sort of, you know, horizontal transaction layers, modern transaction layers, if you will, that end up really creating innovation in a market and looking at the healthcare world. It was no one was really doing that. And it sort of felt like a perfect storm from a timing perspective. And so we just started, you know, writing code, plugging stuff in just laying laying the bricks, laying the pipes, and, you know, here Here we are, you know, six, seven years later, and The platform has become what it is.

Alexander Ferguson 15:02
I’m curious about seven years ago, if you could go back to when when you started, if you could share, say something to yourself seven years ago now, you know, now, what would you go back and say,

Andrei Pop 15:13
I hire more engineers faster.

Alexander Ferguson 15:19
This problem? Is it just it? Was it a bigger undertaking than maybe you realized?

Andrei Pop 15:25
Yeah, I mean, it’s so so it’s funny. Like, I would say that we started with this incredibly simple vision, which is, you know, we I described it early as the checkout with PayPal experience. So I want to be able to push a button as a consumer, and I don’t care where my data is, I just want it to show up. And it turns out, we had to build like five companies to make that happen. Right. So it, which again, turned out to be this incredibly complex problem, like number one. Where is my health data? most consumers have no idea. And it’s, you know, it’s buried in these antiquated IT systems that are in, you know, on prem deployments sitting in a basement somewhere and a server that hasn’t been touched in 15 years. It’s, you know, there aren’t modern API’s to get to these systems. They’re very fragmented. It’s very healthcare data is an incredibly fragmented market. It’s not like, I just go and do, you know, two or three partnerships, and I’m done. It’s done, we had to figure out a way to make that data searchable. Right. So when when we have a, we have a whole sort of complex web of technologies that enable a consumer to say, type in, you know, Dr. Smith, where’s your data? Oh, it’s Dr. Smith, Dr. Smith practices at this medical facility, which is part of this network, which uses this Electronic Health Record system, which connects to this API. And we constantly update this graph of relationships, and keep it updated in real time as consumers are using it. So we build that, and then all the normalization technology. So healthcare data is not structured, it’s not clean, it’s, you know, very every Electronic Health Record system implements standards little bit differently, there aren’t really standards to speak of, it’s a lot of messy, noisy data. And so then we had to go solve that problem. And, you know, turn to get a modern clean API that a developer wants to work with, or anybody wants to work with, we had to do a ton of lifting on and just ingesting data running NLP models, understanding the processing and the structure of that data. So we can create these ontologies. So we can make these modern API’s happen. So I guess, you know, like I said, hire more engineers faster. It’s really I didn’t realize at the time that we would have to build to achieve that, I think very simple, but very powerful vision. We had to build like five companies, it was crazy.

Alexander Ferguson 17:49
This this concept of, Okay, let’s just go get the data, but then it’s in all sorts of places, antiquated concepts, and then it’s all structured differently. And now to keep it updated, have you built then as part of your platform? Is it mostly automated? Are you just have teams of people that are constantly going through the data and making sure it’s still operating properly? And coming through cleanly?

Andrei Pop 18:12
Oh, no, it’s it’s automated. I mean, that’s a big, big part of the heavy lift here was, you know, obviously, we’ve had experts in the company, I mean, to build these models, these are, these are very complex systems to not just engineer the transaction of but actually the, the understanding and interpretation of that data. But absolutely, it’s got to be automated. I mean, at the scales we deal with, just to give you one example, you know, our network was recently put in place for, and I can’t name the airlines, but for several states in the United States that are operating, you know, testing out vaccine passports with airlines for us all, you know, we’re recording this and in May of 2021, right, we’re on the verge, hopefully, knock wood of reopening air, from the from the COVID pandemic, and, you know, the ability to verify someone’s negative vaccine result in real time. is, you know, I mean, first off, it’s, it’s, it’s incredibly powerful, but it’s just like, having to do that for the scale of, I’m trying to get on a flight. This has to happen in 17 seconds, where I’m going to be dissatisfied as a consumer. I mean, it’s all that all that plumbing, all that normalization, all that platform technology, that’s what we’ve been investing in. So it’s, it’s fully automated, is working now. Like, like someone this has working for an airline to that would this happen? Yeah, we’re doing this for we’re doing this for stadiums. We’re doing this for some return to work. We’re doing this for airlines. And, you know, you’ve been reading about all the college campuses that are mandating vaccines for a return to work. You know, I think it’s going to be the markets still up in the air in terms of where it’s, you know, some folks are saying we’re going to have them some folks are saying we’re not, again, from our perspective back to what we were saying earlier about pushing innovators forward, you know, we’re that transaction, we’re the only company that can provide real time verification of that across the country. And then each sort of private business can do with it what they want, right? Some folks are gonna say, this is really important to me, reopening my place of work, and other folks are gonna say, you know, what? I’m good with with the honor system. And you know, we’re happy on both sides.

Alexander Ferguson 20:22
It’s an amazing and very clickable use case, right now that I think we can all understand that immediate, yes, I don’t have any COVID and be able to use it. Now to make that happen. As you say, this has been seven years in the making to build this together. And you you’ve made a statement that there’s no competitors. Is that really true? Like there’s nothing a competition for that has access to, to the quantity of, I guess, data points that are coming in that clean output?

Andrei Pop 20:52
Yeah, I mean, and you see this play out in, in a lot of markets that have, you know, these large horizontal platforms, right, because, like, named willows close competitor, I bet you can or plaids, right. I mean, it’s, it’s what what ends up happening. And it’s not that we don’t have competition, right, I think what ends up happening is the competition isn’t is localized to the specific market. So there, there’s sort of these two categories, right? There are folks that are doing what I would consider the analog to our digital. So I mentioned fax machines a little bit tongue in cheek, but the majority of healthcare data in this country still gets transacted by fax machines. And there are huge organizations that have call centers and you know, with hundreds of rows of folks that are calling up doctor’s offices saying, I need to get Alex’s medical records fax from point A to point B, and, yeah, well,

Alexander Ferguson 21:45
there’s other people. There’s other people solving the problem, just not in a very tech savvy way, or futuristic way.

Andrei Pop 21:54
Right. Yeah. And certainly, you know, and look, we in some cases, we have partnerships with folks, when there is that last mile, and, you know, week, the 10% of the time, we can’t get the data digitally, we have to go get it that way, and digitize that we’ve got that capability as well. But what’s really important to understand is that, you know, it’s, it’s all of this kind of any competition we face, in my view, is all about. It’s like stuff that’s holding the industry back, you know what I mean? Like, we’re the modern version of where the industry needs to go, in my view. And I think the more we make data liquid, the more you’re going to push innovation forward. And so, you know, it just happens that in healthcare, you’ve got, you’ve got such a need to have this horizontal aggregation layer, because things have been traditionally so fragmented that you can’t, that’s why I think some of these some of these very vertically oriented competitors, they build really nice point to point solutions. But they haven’t been able to scale a network to 295 million lives and 40,000 sources. I mean, getting access to all those providers. Was that easy.

Alexander Ferguson 23:05
I mean, we did they like yeah, here. Here’s a connection to our database. Well,

Andrei Pop 23:10
yeah, no, it was a look, I think, so easy. No, I think the I think what’s what’s really and again, this comes back to the the core principle of putting the consumer at the center, I think that’s the only thing that made it possible, right? Because, look, these providers, they are under a tremendous amount of pressure to upgrade their electronic health record systems. You know, there there were there were huge incentive programs put in place by the government to help them do that. But those incentive programs came with very onerous restrictions on exactly how and what systems they should put in place, and what functionality those systems needed to have. And so I think, oftentimes, you know, these providers will get a bad rap because, yes, they’re not they don’t have very modern technology in place. The thing that solves that problem, I think elegantly and uniquely to human API is when you have the consumer at the center, right? Because every single one of these systems has methodologies in place to allow consumers to access their data. And that premise is what allowed us to scale as quickly as we did. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, it’s, and I would say, again, very importantly, it was not easy, right? I mean, it just all everything I described at the at the start of this conversation around, how do we even figure out where this data is, and what you know, I could say something like Stanford, Stanford health system, I mean, that we’re talking about 27 different electronic health record systems, configure two dozen different ways across multiple databases. It’s not one single place, but you as a consumer, you’d never think that right? And so we’ve got a part of our value add a big part of our value add is we’ve got to take all that problem away and make it super, super simple, like a one, one stop shop API.

Alexander Ferguson 24:55
So if I if I could understand correctly here, the government has already been pushing for healthcare data to access and and so all all these places have been working on it, to provide it. But it’s not like there’s a phone book that you just go down the lines there, it was connected there there there that you’ve been having to search and connect all the manually.

Andrei Pop 25:14
You got it, and we built and maintain those systems, again over the last seven years, it’s, you know, it’s it’s a joke, it’s a labor of love, I think part of what you have to do to get to the grand vision of, of, you know, being able to create this data liquidity to push innovation forward, is you’ve got to do all that grunt work of making sure that, you know, it’s like, it’s like building the highway network across the country or laying the telephone poles. If you’re at&t, you need that network, so that you can get cool stuff like the iPhone and the ecosystem of apps that we all have into have made this possible, I can imagine that the the team that you build is is what’s been able to make it happen. How big is the team today? Yeah, it’s, it’s it’s everything. So we’re right around 100 people now, we’ve just started to, to scale out our go to market organization a little more actually. So a big thing I mentioned earlier, you know, they need to hire engineers. I mean, that’s, this has been a very engineering and data science, heavy endeavor, we’ve spent a lot of time care and capital there. And, you know, that’s, that’s right around the size we are, and that’s growing very quickly

Alexander Ferguson 26:27
at the moment. And now it’s now now in need to be able to get even further that people are aware that it exists. And that this is an option that we can can start using. But again, your focus is more on developers, though it wouldn’t be bad the end consumers can know about it, but it’s not like any consumer is going to go to human API and sign up or do I have that incorrect?

Andrei Pop 26:46
No, you’ve got to correct in terms of our strategy. Now, as a consumer, you absolutely can go to human API and sign up. And now what we’re not doing is we’re not out there marketing to consumers all day, because, you know, it’s it’s not a most of the time, folks are gonna find out about us through one of our partners, right, the occasional sort of, you know, tech savvy person that’s really interested in their own health data might reach out. And we have started to see more and more of this happening, especially during COVID. Because, you know, folks were very, you know, one of the things that that COVID did is it created an awareness, I think, for a lot of people about health, I mean, it’s become so much more, you know, acute in our society today. And I don’t think that’s going away, I think that’s that very much is here to stay even after, you know, COVID, hopefully, is a thing of the past. And again, as a as it relates to the way consumers hear about us, you absolutely can go sign up, use the product, see our ecosystem of partners connect your data, and, you know, start to view and understand it and see what else you can do with it as part of this ecosystem. However, most folks, and most of our strategy is focused on the b2b side of our business. So your

Alexander Ferguson 27:57
business model is built on access to the API itself, correct? Correct. That’s right. So it’s not like consumers are charged by the fact that you have the data, they can get access to this free 100%. Free, yep, working through it. It’s more like, I think some of the ad space is going this way, hopefully, that you can decide if you want to have your data shared to be advertised to. or not. And it sounds like you people have the decision, I will give my data to this developer this application or choose not to anything you can share just closing thoughts here of looking ahead of where that you see the space going, when it comes to healthcare and technology kind of come up whether you’re something you’re excited about the you’re developing, or just the future in general.

Andrei Pop 28:44
Yeah. So look, I think there’s, and I mentioned a little earlier, this, this idea of, it’s hard for us to know. Because all the stuff we can imagine right now, I guarantee you, there are people smarter than us, that will come up with something that is 10 times cooler. So I think that as it relates to the stuff that we’re working on, look, I think we’re still in the first inning here. I mean, I it’s it’s really, you build a railroad and you start running trains on it, right, and you’re you’re moving data around, you’re helping folks that are that are creating value for consumers. And if we can replace Look, if we can replace all the fax machines in this country, with our API, I think we will, that we will have done and put the power in the consumers hands as part of doing that. We will have done a tremendous service, I believe to the healthcare industry. But I don’t think that’s the end game. I think the end game is now that you as a consumer are empowered with that data. And this entire ecosystem of partners around there, just like you mentioned, is vying for not selling you ads, but actually creating value. Let me look through your medical history and let me understand, let me get you the best price for your prescription drugs, let me help monitor your medical fraud to make sure that you’re not being billed erroneously. I look through your medical history, and I see that you’ve got a family history of something, let me suggest you get screened, right for a specific type of rare cancer. And so I think when you look to the future of what human API can enable, it’s all about those types of solutions. It’s all about how can we make people’s lives better, happier and healthier? by actually creating and driving this type of value now that the data is liquid? What can we do with it?

Alexander Ferguson 30:33
I’m not that much of a cynical person. But I know there are some people that did it. Again, they look at this and wonder about the privacy of it. Okay, I give back I gave access now to say, yes, let people look at it. But doesn’t, does everyone all these developers start seeing me as a person and know all about me, maybe just help me understand a bit more and our viewers have? What is it come down to privacy wise.

Andrei Pop 30:54
And for those that are interested, we’ve got an entire section of our website dedicated to data security, privacy, and specifically consumer control our promise to consumers the safeguards we put in place, you’re always in control as a consumer, and what does that actually mean? Right behind it, because here’s the thing, that the world is going this way. So not only, I believe it’s the morally right thing to do to give consumers control over this. But the world is also we’re seeing this with legislation, whether it be GDPR in Europe, you know, some of the more recent California legislation related to this privacy. So look, you as a consumer via human API, first off, we can’t access view or transmit your data without your explicit consent. In any instance, human API is never white labeled as a product, which means that you are always aware of the fact that human API is part of this transaction as a consumer, so you know exactly where your data is going, you know, from point A, through us to point B, you’re always in control, you can save that data with us, or you can choose to delete it completely. And you could say that, you know, think of the checkout as a guest option. So we’ve built a lot of security and compliance controls in place as part of the fabric of the company, so that we can actually offer this type of service and not have to worry about, you know, the terrible sort of reality that might befall a consumer who’s helped and it gets in the wrong hands.

Alexander Ferguson 32:25
I appreciate the focus on it, because I feel like that is the future. And it’s like already doing the right thing right now. So your future proofing it the white hat versus black hat mentality, or everyone will look at it. But it’s it you mentioned was like, we’re all headed in this direction of more data everywhere. And I feel like legislation or something? Well, on the insurance side, they this year, they were supposed to, they were set to they have to have their data available. Is that correct? Like there is a law that passed?

Andrei Pop 32:53
Yeah, that’s right. So it’s and again, their versions of this law have been rolling for for a while now. But everything legislatively is pointed towards consumers have to their no information blocking is allowed by providers is the right way to think about it. So as a consumer, I have the right to obtain my data. Now there’s nuance to that and how much the provider can charge you for it. And you know, how what mechanism they can deliver it to you in like a CD ROM that you don’t know how to read. But But fundamentally, the idea is, as a consumer, if I knock on the door of my provider, and I say I need a copy of my data, they cannot make a refusal to that request.

Alexander Ferguson 33:36
Are you just looking ahead to the future? Just for fun, if you could wave your hand and have any futuristic sci fi solution appear? Oh, anything that comes comes to your mind that you like, man, if I could just have this? That’d be great.

Andrei Pop 33:50
You mean, related to this specifically or

Alexander Ferguson 33:54
open ended in some ways, like open ended?

Andrei Pop 33:56
I mean, I look, I would say I, I would love for us to get incredibly cheap genome sequencing. I think it is a it is and we’re heading there, obviously. But when I look at the, you know, between that the the microbiome, these areas of our health that we’re still, you know, when you look across all of the different types of healthcare data that exists, sensor technology is catching up medical records, obviously, digitizing that data, making it liquid is an incredibly powerful and important endeavor. There are other aspects of our health that we’re just starting to measure and understand now. So we’re a little earlier than, you know, some of this we can we can measure things like our blood glucose continuously now. And we can infer some very powerful things from that, when we will be able to measure genes in the same way and whether you know, they turn on and turn off based on certain epigenetic factors and I think we’re going to have a again, it’s like the next Next level of what can we build on top of that, to help improve the quality of human life? And I think that’s if we could get there faster, man I’d be I’d be very excited about that.

Alexander Ferguson 35:11
I love it. I love the future that you paint. Thank you so much for for sharing both what your personal mission and the company vision of where you guys are headed. For those that wants to learn more, definitely go to humanapi.co. and sign up look at your own data. And I guess the availability that’s out there. Thanks again, Andrei. It was a good conversation. Thanks for having me, Alex. This is great. Really appreciate it. I will see you all guys on the next episode of UpTech Report. Have you seen a company using AI machine learning or other technology to transform the way we live, work and do business? Go to UpTech report.com and let us know