Episode 4
When Innovation Heals
With Darryl Grauman
In this episode of REWIRED, Akanksha Bilani sits down with Darryl Grauman, founder of IndigiTECH and Head of R&D at The Clinician, to explore how technology can bridge divides and transform care. From empowering underrepresented students in New Zealand through digital education, to reimagining global healthcare with AI-driven insights, Darryl’s journey proves that innovation, when rooted in empathy and access, can change lives.
Together, they unpack how cloud, GenAI, and data are not just enabling smarter systems, but building more human-centered ones, where patients are heard, education is inclusive, and every connection creates possibility. Because when innovation heals, the future becomes personal.
REWIRED Ep 4 Podcast Transcript
Akanksha Bilani (Host):
Welcome to Rewired, a podcast that shares the coolest stories of innovation and behind the scenes breakthroughs from Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners.
I'm your host, Akanksha Bilani. I run the global go-to market team for Team Amazon at Intel, helping bridge the path with AWS’s customers, partners, and AWS. Today, I have the privilege of speaking to Darryl Grauman, the founder of IndigiTECH. Darryl, my buddy from my life at APJ. Thank you so much for being here.
Darryl Grauman:
Thanks so much for the invitation, Akanksha. It's so good to see you again. It's been such a while since I've seen you in person.
Akanksha Bilani:
Definitely miss our interactions and the crazy dreams that we had together that I do feel right now are a reality. I want to have you just tell our audience about your role, and what gets you excited and what you do from a career perspective, and possibly even personally, in your life today.
Darryl Grauman:
I'm super happy to have been involved with the IndigiTECH program, which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. And my heartfelt thank you to the guys at Intel for being one of our prime sponsors. There are thousands of kids out there that would not have received the education that they are now without the help that Intel gave us.
So from the bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you for that. Right now, I’m the head of R&D, for a company called The Clinician. And what we do is we monitor and
manage patients outside the hospital setting. It's about putting the patient voice back into their treatment. And through the information that we’re capturing with AI, we're making some amazing strides in being able to personalize healthcare globally for millions of people.
Akanksha Bilani:
Loved the intro on The Clinician, but I know that you also have IndigiTECH as your little baby as well as, I would say, your project that really got us collaborating and working together. Do you want to tell us a little bit about IndigiTECH, what's the exciting vision as well as results that you've seen from the project?
Really getting our audience to understand how did you use technology like cloud as well as Gen AI, to make this project come alive?
Darryl Grauman:
The program started a number of years ago, and the ideas came from when Covid hit. Because when Covid hit, there were thousands of kids that were sent home from school and told to get online. And the problem with that was we had kids in lower socioeconomic areas, predominantly Maori and Pacifica kids, who went home and they had nothing to attach to.
There wasn't a computer in the house. There wasn't an internet connection. Okay. That even though they were finally sent internet routers and laptops, their parents had never touched these things before. And it was, how do we even connect them? How do we get online? And so these kids didn't get schooling for a long time. From that, we sat down with some of our partners, Education Perfect, who have a software education program that is run in schools.
Code Avengers– they have got a platform which schools kids on how to actually code. Lancom Technology, a systems integrator, AWS and Intel. And we sat down and we said, look, what could we do? And what's the best thing that we could do for these kids with all the evidence that we had? The intercept point was in intermediate school.
So these are kids ages 11, 12, bordering 13, before they go into high school. On average, when we surveyed them, there were about 20% of the kids said that they were going to go on and pick up a STEM subject in high school. Once they completed part of the program, we increased that number to over 50%. Doubling the amount of kids that have got the propensity to do this, intercepting them at that age and then bringing them into high school and having so many more select STEM as a career path. That was the overall objective.
The best thing was the guys at Education Perfect and Code Avengers too. Great AWS partners and the team at Lancom, and for all getting together and putting specific programs together for these kids, using platforms to provide education to these kids in the way that they wanted to learn. In storybook format, using the kinds of imagery that they would be used to having at home.
Some of them like the competition and the quizzes. Some of them like learning in pictures. The platform decides the way of learning with each of the kids, and so that's just amazing to see. We have these family days where we bring in a whole bunch of our partners, who will exhibit and show cool stuff that you can do.
So everything from robotics to AI to Oculus glasses to everything else. We had the team from Xero come in, the team from Spark New Zealand come in and talk about career paths for these kids. But not just to the kids, to the parents as well.
I remember one interaction that I had, which will always stick in my head, at a family day because, one of the dads, was complaining to me says, ‘my son just plays video games. He doesn't go out and do sports. He just plays video games.’
I had a conversation with him. I said, you know, that video games is a multibillion dollar industry? You know, there’s game testers, there's all sorts of programing that can be
done in games. Alright? And now even into Vibe coding, kids making their own games, it's just amazing what we can do now. And he was like, you mean the time's not being wasted? You mean you can make a career out of this?
Akanksha Bilani:
‘He’s actually applying the skills?’
Darryl Grauman:
Yeah! And so, you know, that's the kind of thing that we're doing at IndigiTECH, it's just, it's just super cool.
Akanksha Bilani:
It's incredible. And given the fact that you increased propensity for kids to choose STEM paths, making sure that we have more doctors, more scientists, more mathematicians, I think that is phenomenal. That impacts lives, as well as, you're setting up all of these little kids for success, for the future. So congratulations on this purpose as well as this project, Darryl and the IndigiTECH team.
Darryl Grauman:
Your help in securing AWS and Intel assistance and Intel sponsorship as one of the main sponsors. I mean, you yourself, Akanksha, have helped spearhead this thing. So you really deserve a lot of thanks as well.
Akanksha Bilani:
Well, it takes a village, Darryl, and I've been having this regular theme when I'm having interactions with my favorite people in this podcast series. It's really about the power of partnerships driving impact to lives and this is a perfect reflection of it. Just keeping on that same path with The Clinician, as well as, IndigiTECH, do you want to talk a little bit more about your experience of how you've adopted today's industry trends or technologies like cloud and Gen AI? Even help, the patients right now, get more access to what they need in terms of medical facilities under The Clinician.
Darryl Grauman:
If I can just explain what Clinician does, we do what's called PROMS and PREMS. Patient reported outcome measures and patient reported experience measures. When you enroll in the platform, when the Clinician enrolls you into the platform, you'll keep getting specific surveys that are clinically graded to ask you specific questions about how you are going? If you’ve had knee surgery: How am I walking? What's my pain scale?
Can I do this? Can I do that? And we look at that data in terms of a clinical journey, and whether me, as a person in my demographic, how I'm actually doing. But in addition to that, the platform captures a raft of other data. Things like medication, procedures, biometrics, etc.. So we've got this co-mingling of subject of an object of data.
And so what we do is we take a look at that subject of an object of data, and we look at it and we look for any kinds of anomalies in that data. And we look at the entire patient as a whole, as an individual with all of their medications, their comorbidities and everything else. And we're using AI to go out and take a look at all of the subject of an object of data around a patient, and pre-predict any kind of issues that may occur in that treatment journey.
But then it gets even better, because now if somebody has been on our platform for a while, if you're then admitted with something else, another issue. Okay. Now we've got all of this rich information that we can pass over to the LLMs in what we call patient-in-context. And what we've now got the ability to do is to provide customized care pathways for each individual. When it gets to the patient voice in patient care, it's... the world is opening up with AI.
Akanksha Bilani:
Incredible, incredible. And, just on that same vein, Darryl, my last question to you would be, based on where you see healthcare really adopting platforms like cloud, platforms like AI, platforms like Gen AI, what do you feel is your prediction for the future for our healthcare industry?
Darryl Grauman:
We're in tests at the moment, but what would happen if I could also upload a digital copy of my DNA into the mix? And based on my DNA, as well as my clinical history, how much more precise can we make treatment plans based on the individual? I think we're a couple of years away. But I think it's close.
Akanksha Bilani:
That's an incredible vision and more power to you, Darryl, as well as The Clinician team. Well, that wraps our show today. You've been listening to Rewired, the podcast celebrating innovation on the bleeding edge. Brought to you by Intel, AWS, and our favorite partners. Check out our show notes on Rewired page at www.rewired-podcast.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts, for links to learn more about what we discussed today.
I’m your host, Akanksha Bilani, and I would love to really extend a massive thank you to Darryl Grauman, the founder of IndigiTECH, as well as partner for The Clinician, for being here and sharing these amazing stories and platforms that are saving lives all the way from New Zealand, but scaled to the global world. Darryl, thank you so much for coming!
Darryl Grauman:
Thank you so much for the invitation! I love your work. Can't wait to see you in person. See you soon.
Akanksha Bilani:
See you! Bye.
