Healthcare happens in our daily lives outside the buildings we traditionally go to for care.
In this episode of Bite the Orange, Rosanne Warmerdam, co-founder of HealthBlocks BV and The Pando Network, discusses how health is affected by many different factors and is in each of our hands to take action. Medical and health data are usually stored in different systems, but with HealthBlocks, patients can store all their personal information in one place, and control what happens to it. Rosanne mentions blockchain, democratizing these services and tools to improve health outcomes and expanding healthcare into a preventative-based ecosystem. She also talks about the current stage HealthBlocks is in and where it will go.
Tune in to this great episode about blockchain, data usage, and technology.
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Roseanne Warmerdam: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Roseanne Warmerdam: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange. And today we are speaking to a very special guest all the way from Holland. Exactly, today I learned about the health tech ecosystem down in Holland. And that's not only that, but today I think we have a special opportunity to listen to Roseanne. She has a very special way of looking at healthcare, and it's something that I fully align with, and I think most listeners will actually support her on this particular mission. But she is definitely a guest that we need to have on the show. And today I would like to introduce you to Roseanne Warmerdam, the founder and CEO of HealthBlocks and also the founder of Pando Network. Welcome to the show, Roseanne.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Thank you so much for having me.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you. So, ... then, to tell us something about yourself.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Firstly, I have a background in biomedical sciences. I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm wired loving the human body and how it all works. I remember being a little girl standing in front of the mirror at like, I was like six or seven years old and looking at my hand every day and thinking I could only think of like, how does it work? How can it be that I just like moving around and I don't even have to think about it? So basically, I always have a million questions from my parents, my family about the human body, biology and everything around it. So that curiosity led me to studying biomedical sciences. But during and towards the end of my study, I realized that we know a lot about disease, but we don't know a lot about health and how it works. And if we are trying to cure people, when are they cured? What is the health perspective that we are having here? And I was like disappointed that wasn't something that was covered in my studies. There wasn't a lot of information available about it. Also, we have like preventative healthcare, which is coming up in the past years. But I graduated around ten years ago and it wasn't that big. So I went on a journey to learn a lot about healthcare systems of the world, kind of like shaping my vision on prevention and having kind of like a passion to make an impact on that front. And yeah, my personal mission is to increase healthy life expectancy of people around the globe. So not only to become older, but how do we become older in good health and happiness and wellbeing, of course. So that's something that we are working on with our companies every day.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Roseanne, you said many things that are like to peel back on, sort of those ideas, .... I think that really we don't really understand much about disease either. Something I really like about your background piece is like looking at how the human body also connects to the planet around us, right? It's been something that in general we ignore things that we just look at what is healthy in general, right? What is health good data. And I think that how we interact with society and how we interact in general with everything around us and how the human body actually fits with a physical environment actually plays a big role in health, and what health is. What do you think about that?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yes, that's very important. If you look at the numbers that we're seeing nowadays, is that your chances to become old, to age old in, in a healthy way are 80% determined by lifestyle, but also environment. And I think we are, it's very easy to overlook that, right, because environment is something, it's very hard already to control your lifestyle, let's say alone, that you have to do something about your environment as well. But it's very important and you see a lot of, what I love about my journey in the past years is that I've learned that a lot of things that are happening in the outside world are also reflected in our inside world and a lot of systems in our body. If we look at new findings on epigenetics, what I love the whole metaphor around the microbiome as well, and what I love about the microbiome is that we literally use it from the planet. The bacteria in and around our body are not yours. They are, you can host them and they've been here way before us and will be there way after me as well. Sort of, like old, like hints towards that. We have to look at a different approach and take healthcare out of a building. It's not happening in a doctor's office or a hospital. It's happening in our day-to-day life, in the environment in which we move around in, and we can do so much more about it. Indeed, health data or making sense of that world, our inside world and our outside world is something that's very difficult. But I believe as God like it be, that the data also always gives like some clues that we can work around with, but are also always like a mystic effect that you can predict upfront.
Emmanuel Fombu:
... Roseanne, I always say that we are, being a physician myself, and I'll tell you that I got to a point where I felt like we're in the business of sick care ... health. And when we say toward healthcare, I think we need to look at the whole human, and you have to look at people as patients, all your patients or your, I like to work consumer. I like to ... a person in general because all of us to be patient at one point in time or the other. And so I have this vision of something that I'm very interested in and I hope, through the journey of this podcast and with the story that we go through is actually create this kind of ecosystem. And I think that's what you ... on The Pando Network, ... To become a member and we'll talk about that later and how we can join in there. While I look at this thing from a, you mentioned epigenetics, looking at the point of, looking at the human genome, right? So I got myself, for example, I get my whole genome sequenced, right? And I know the risk of disease, right? What is the risk of me having the condition? Right? I know, for example, my grandmother died from heart failure, she had hypertension. When I did my gene sequencing, I found that I have a risk for hypertension. Also found that I had the ability to smell asparagus in urine, I don't know how useful that is, but that's something that for ... about myself. And so there are two things for me to do about it. I could either do nothing and just wait till I get disease or I can become more proactive about my healthcare today. But there's no centralized ecosystem for me to actually collect these data sets around, I have proactive alerts to actually make me even more, keep ... my healthcare, and this could be any condition for any particular person. And so I think this brings it down to what you do at ..., right? So tell me specifically about HealthBlocks and what you do there?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yes, that does, almost what we're doing with HealthBlocks. So HealthBlocks is a web3 company, a blockchain-based company built on the fundamental belief that we believe that come like health data and especially the preventative health data, kind of like that we are collecting with our IOT devices and we're collecting on a day to day lives, so not the healthcare data, your health records, and how can we utilize that data to help improve people to have that higher healthy life expectancy so to manage their health throughout their entire lives. And I think we have to start pretty early with that and we have to build out the infrastructure to be able to do that. So HealthBlocks is basically a health platform in which you can save all your health data at one place. So normally all the data, your health data is pretty siloed, maybe you are using a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, and that data of that wearable or device is stored with that hardware provider, and you had your DNA sequence or your microbiome analyzed, and that is stored with the provider of that service, and there's not one place where it all comes together. And so that's what we are providing with HealthBlocks, but we're building it on a fundamental belief that we believe that the user should always be the owner of the data and should always be in full control of what's happening with it. And that's where blockchain comes in and where we can make sure that people are the real owner of their data. We have still a long way to go because the devices that we are using are not trusted yet, but we will come, get start out with some hybrid models there. And then the question is how can we use that data for one, to improve our health, and the second very important thing is how can we democratize the value of data? And I would, we would love to see a way to democratize the monetary value of the data as well, to make sure that a lot more people get access to health support, right, preventative health support or healthcare if you need if you become sick or have something, but make that make it available to a lot more people. And to do that, we can like divided up the, kind of, like the utility of the data that we're using in three ways, a gamification part, so we have some, we have some, we are designing some very cool gamification features that can like reward people for a healthy lifestyle, but also you can also be rewarded by, for just collecting data, you don't always have to complete a goal. That is, of course even better, but you can also compound on collecting data on its own because if you have, if you're collecting more data for a longer period of time where data sets become more valuable as well, for your prediction of your health, but also the monetary value. The second one is providing access to health support. So health services and health products that are personalized and made for you and who are available to you that you can pay for partly with the rewards that you are earning in the gamification part. And then the third way is the data exchange. Like how can we make the data exchangeable to third parties without losing the ownership for the user, but also get back the small revenue stream in which you can use for that help support. Those, like, the ecosystem that we are envisioning and building at the moment.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite fascinating because basically paying people to stay healthy, right, and giving them ownership of the data. So from my understanding, this is how it works, right? In general, so you download the HealthBlocks app, right? You could get this in iOS or Android and then you create your health profile, which I'm doing this, immediately after this, by the way, right? And then you have to say the recovery phrase, because with blockchain technology, you have a whole phrase, make sure that you actually own your data sets, right? So you say the recovery phrase, connect your smart device, complete your health goals. And then ... Health, that's what I really love about that piece of it, you actually earn in health. They be proactive about what you actually doing here. But, so tell me something here. Why HealthBlocks, right? So what, I'm fascinated with this question is not only about what you do for HealthBlocks, but also, I mean, I'm so curious about mindset in Holland, for example, right? I think it's a quarter of a piece of seven companies coming out of Holland focus on a blockchain and the mentality of the culture that you live in, so tell us about.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
So why HealthBlocks, the first off is that we are always are looking around in the world like how can we, how is emerging technology helping to, help us with the mission to increase that healthy life expectancy, many. And there are a couple of things that are very challenging in our field, and that is scalability. A lot of like healthcare initiatives are not scalable beyond the borders of the country they are launched in, because of the healthcare system is so different in all the world. So that was something that we got very excited about HealthBlocks, and the second thing is that I truly believe that we make the potential so huge about making use of the health data that we're collecting nowadays. And we see that the also the hardware manufacturers are moving that way. If we're looking at the evolution of smartwatches and some routes that are, that Apple is taking regarding to sensors that they are putting in there, we are collecting so much data about ourselves. How can it be that it's so hard to incorporate it in some good infrastructure that helps manage our health throughout our lives and I just don't believe that within the healthcare ecosystem there will be down, like a solution for this because I believe that prevention, that we have to ask ourselves the question, does prevention belong to healthcare? Because if I look at the healthcare system around the world, they are just like not designed to do something beyond their own building. And health and prevention is happening in their daily lives. So we have to look at the, way more from a consumer perspective and make it fit in our daily lives, in our daily routines, make it accessible. And I think it's very good to have that level of innovation from within the healthcare sector. So that's something that we always try to stay away from for a while, while we can. And the third thing is that I believe that hopefully in not that near future, a Nobel Prize for healthcare will be, will be rewarded to some data-driven or AI that predicts a heart disease or something, right? I believe that we live in times that nobody should die from, from heart attack, right? It is so predictable, it's not happening from one day to another, it's something that builds up in years and years. How can it be that we are not managing that or just missing that? The data should be there already. So I think it's just kind of like a direction that we are moving in and we are missing some fundamental infrastructure to do it in the right way. And democratizing the value of the data is very important, in my opinion, to make sure that it's a fair system, that is accessible for everybody, and that is one of my biggest concerns, is that preventative health and a healthy life expectancy will be only for the few and not for the many, and that that should be design flaws that we have to think about from the start.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And you said something that is very important there. And just to highlight, because those, my family, my ... from Cameroon and I grew up listening to like French ... music, which is like .... And one of the big artists, his name is ...., he died in France actually a few days ago, actually performing on stage at the age of 41, collapsing .. Like we have., ..., which is a career soccer player, died in a soccer stadium from a heart attack. I have read and I went to high school with John Paul ... but never drank, never smoke, died at the age of 28 of a pulmonary embolous, and he was a nurse, right, it helped to shape. I have several other stories like this from young people in my age and generation that died from heart attacks, like the things that are preventable in today's world. And I think that we could, people shouldn't be dying like that right? So while we talk about this, it's not something about some futuristic, imaginary ... that actually happens, right? I worked personally on a study designed to predict these kind of, these situations. You could have ... do with today with Apple Watch and Fitbits and all these things that exist today into this world. But the average person doesn't know about this. As we have a conversation talking about what we discussing and we talk about the idea of keeping this out of the healthcare ecosystem, it's quite depressing, don't you think? Right? Because we're all looking at healthcare as sick care, right? You have something like this and then say, let's keep it out of the healthcare infrastructure, right. Let's put it in the consumer world with it. Isn't it scary?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah. Or we could say healthcare should officially be named sickcare. And it's kind of like, ... what they're, kind of like, focus point is and where they are good at. And we have to provide good care for everybody and acute care, one, is necessary, of course, but the health management, the whole trajectory that is before you, you enter a building or entering the health, the sickcare system. The question is, should that also be under their management? I'm not sure what the right answer is. I'm not hoping that it will become like a market-driven, a completely market-driven journey. But I'm pretty sure that we are not getting far if we are waiting for the sickcare folks to show up here.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I think that revolution, that movement comes from the individual, right, is not something that is a system that we have to create and see if you're in the system or out of the system, right? It comes down to you as the individual to say, do you want to take care of your own healthcare? You want to take care of yourself, of the individual, and whether you get sick or not, what is the best version of you? So it's not necessarily I might, because you could go through that system, you could be in a sick care side where, like, for example, you have a broken bone and of course you go to the hospital, right? You're not going to stay home and play with that, right? But you can come in and out of the system, but it's a continuum, right? And it's based on you as an individual to maintain your own healthcare .... So it has to be, and has an individual, and I think that the only way to do that has to be driven by blockchain technology. So I like that core element of it, how you earn something, right? Because the data becomes something that you actually get rewards from and has gamified, that makes it actually very interesting.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah, exactly. And like we just say, it's a continuum, right? It's just, that is something that we as individuals or as society are not used to. As I could continue that, that we have to help management in place that is a part of our daily life to save some time, energy and have to do some of our health management and not only living a healthy lifestyle, but also check if it's all going okay. I haven't come like an e-journal check once in a while to see how that's going and that can be data-driven. It's also like being in touch with our own feelings and knowing ourselves, of course. But yeah, I like what you're saying.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I love what you're doing. So I'm saying you're doing, so that's actually, that's a good thing, so it takes, isn't teamwork. ... So I noticed that you launched in January of 2019 and I've looked at a road map, so you started by researching in Q3 2019, did the ecosystem design in Q2 2021. And now if I look at ... like Q4 2022, you have a goal of having a public sale ideal and the world 15K, 10,000 active users. So how many active users do you currently have for one, the beta platform?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah. So we are only live with the beta version of the app. So it's very basic at the moment. We were expecting, we were hoping to get 2 to 3,000 beta users up and running in the beta phase. We are now over 12,000. So it kind of took a flight and we almost didn't know very bit of marketing efforts to get there. So we were like really surprised when this happened. And we're now working towards the main launch of how blocks in, it probably will be in Q1 of next year. Yeah, the markets times changed, the world changed a little bit. So we are also taking some extra time to take some extra steps and build up further on what we've learned from the beta.
Emmanuel Fombu:
.... Look, you're hoping to have 3,000 and you have what, 12,000 ....
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Wow. Okay. Congratulations on that first of all, that's great.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And so.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
We didn't suspect it at all.
Emmanuel Fombu:
.... users from? Where the users from? You know, what part of the world they're in, is it all in the Europe? ... Tell me.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
No, we are downloaded in over 80 countries, but the main, the main target audience is in Asia. So a lot of Indian, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Then we have a quite big portion in Europe and the US as well. But it went down not far, but it went down like it, we had a lot of growth, user growth in, in India and Indonesia and it's mainly due because of kind of like the move to earn hype or come like energy was going on. So a lot of people are trying out new move to earn concepts of which HealthBlocks was one of them. So we were, at some point of time we were shared in a lot of groups and a lot of users canned the app. And that was also the point that we decided to not do any marketing whatsoever any more on the bed or launch because we thought we can learn from this amount of users, but we don't want to grow that much in, in this phase because it's very basic at the moment.
Emmanuel Fombu:
No, it's quite fascinating and interesting because a lot of times, like I'm in the US and you're in Europe lot will look at ... innovation in healthcare with the look in the silos, right? Oh, is it something that's going to scale the US health system? Is this something that's in Europe and we could ignore the rest of the markets. So this is a great example of democratizing healthcare and making healthcare truly global, where you have people actually get priced to buy healthcare. And so with that being said, ... the age group of people downloaded this, what do you know about users ... And the younger population. Oh, yeah, how do they?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah, the population at, or becoming a target group that, that we, that are using the better now are mostly web3 enthusiasts, I think like age group below 40. I'm not sure what, a lot of like the Web3 community can be translated to our beta community as well. And what we see is that a lot of people that are like indeed are ..., like getting rewarded for a healthy lifestyle is something that I'm really interesting in, interested in, and some of them are maybe already having a healthier lifestyle today, or are already walking 10,000 steps a day and think, I have your smartphone with me. I'm recording those steps, so why not earning some, some rewards with it? Others are really using it as a motivational tool to adjust their lifestyle. So we got a lot of messages that people like, I lost a really like five kilograms because I'm now walking around each day because I want to make a health streak or want to get the rewards. So that's two different groups that we are seeing. And that's always kind of the thing, right, with the preventative health, a lot of the comments are that only healthy people are using it because they already know the benefits of it and they don't have to adjust a lot anymore in their lifestyle. But we are seeing now is that a lot of our beta users are not like the classical healthy population. We have a good mix of everything and that is what we are really happy about.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So it's quite fascinating what you've done up to this point where you go, and, so what has been the biggest challenge so far that you faced and what you're building is very sophisticated technology, it's a mindset that is completely different, right? And so I'm sure there were some challenges along the journey. So what are, share some of those ...?
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Yeah, so we have, we have a good amount of challenges, to be honest. The technical part, of course, is one, we are working with some new technology. We are building, HealthBlocks is being build on the IOT blockchain, which is a layer one blockchain built from scratch. So it's not, it's Ethereum-based blockchain, it's from scratch, but ... is already live since 2019. Didn't have any errors so far. And what could, what's so nice about IOT tech, why we are so excited about that is that a, their blockchain is being built for IOT and what they want to do is bring real-world data into the digital realm and make it trusted. So they're already built like to trust the advisors themselves and they kind of like making the tools and the SDK for hardware providers to also make your existing hardware also trusted. So give that real ownership of data to the user. IOTech for us's the perfect partner to make it happen and what they are launching now is a new protocol which is called Web3, which is a real data oracle in which we can do some computing on the data, even though the ownership stays with the users themselves. So that's not really new technology, but we are partnering with a very good partner that helps us through it. What I think is one of the biggest challenges is the perception of markets. So for the traditional digital health and health tech startups, we are like scary because we adopt blockchain and web3 and the rewarding mechanisms and the data layers and the data infrastructure. And for web3 projects, we are not web3 enough because we are not really marketing driven, hyping projects with some flashy NFTs or anything else. We are trying to build the real platform and we are only making use of web3 technology when we think it makes sense. We are not using it for the sake of using it and adding some buzzwords. So we are, sometimes we feel like little in between worlds. So that, that is, sometimes that is challenging. But yeah, then again, it's very encouraging to see that a lot of people that are, started using it or consumer ..., consumer perspective are very well received. But I think that will be our, our main struggle for the short and mid-term to come find our place in the whole ecosystem of digital health, health tech, web3, blockchain.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, thanks for that, Roseanne. I think that was quite fascinating and I love what you're doing and I know we're wrapping up in a few, but if you're listening to this particular episode, I want you to take this all, that HealthBlocks beta, which your current beta state, is all about getting active and earning health tokens by completing health goals and the health tokens that you earn actually during HealthBlock beta will be convert it into the main launch, right, when they drop and you have that piece going. And so please do not miss out on this opportunity and join the HealthBlocks movement. And I'm definitely in the movement and you deserve to be on this particular show and we are fascinated and love the journey that you are on. So thanks again once again, ... Roseanne, I would love to have another episode. Thank you for joining us today.
Roseanne Warmerdam:
Thanks so much, guys.
Emmanuel Fombu:
All right. Thank you.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BiteTheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you can also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About Rosanne Warmerdam:
Rosanne is the co-founder and CEO of HealthBlocks BV and the founder of The Pando Network.
Her purpose is to create health for people and the planet.
Through her studies in Biomedical Sciences, Rosanne set her first steps into the healthcare field. Rosanne found out that our current healthcare system is a disease care system, aimed at fighting disease instead of improving health. She’s on a journey to help build a healthcare system that is focused on creating health.
Rosanne believes in a healthcare system that runs independently but is connected to our current disease care and is committed to supporting people on a large scale to improve and maintain their health. This new healthcare system consists of new players, many of which don't even exist yet. It will not be found in an institute or building, it will be everywhere, woven into our society.
With her startup, HealthBlocks, she is at the forefront of building a piece of this new healthcare system. Through The Pando Network, she shares their knowledge and vision to drive innovation and progress in this space.
Things You’ll Learn:
Lifestyle and environmental factors determine 80% of how one will age.
Health data is usually siloed, but HealthBlocks is a solution to keep everything in a single place.
Commonly, health is only restricted to buildings like hospitals and clinics.
Healthcare must start moving toward preventing sickness, not reacting to them.